Simon Downer

Simon is a psychiatrist working in the NHS in an inner city mental health team in Bristol, UK. He is also a psychodynamic psychotherapist working in the NHS and in private practice, a member of Severnside Institute for Psychotherapy and the British Psychoanalytic Council. He has been advisor ally for the Bristol Hearing Voices Network for around ten years. He is Director of the Bristol Psychosis Heath Integration Team, a team of people who experience psychosis, their families and carers, academics, mental health professionals, commissioners, service providers and other experts working together to improve the lives of people with psychosis in Bristol.

Simon is interested in how the systems of psychiatry serve to dehumanise and alienate people, and often do more harm than good. He is trying to promote more thoughtful approaches to mental health work and hopes that working with ISPS will be a powerful way of doing that on a much wider scale.