John Read

Professor John Read worked for nearly 20 years as a Clinical Psychologist and manager of mental health services in the UK and the USA, before joining the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994, where he worked until 2013. He has served as Director of the Clinical Psychology professional graduate programmes at both Auckland and, more recently, the University of Liverpool.
He has published over 150 papers in research journals, primarily on the relationship between adverse life events (eg child abuse/neglect, poverty etc.) and psychosis.
He also researches the extent to which mental health services enquire about adverse life events, the negative effects of bio-genetic causal explanations on prejudice, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), the experiences of recipients of anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medication, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in mental health research and practice.
John is Chair of the International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (www.iipdw.org) and is on the Board of the Hearing Voices Network – England. In 2022 he was listed in Stanford University’s register of the top 2% most cited researchers in the world, and was inducted as a Life Member of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (www.isps.org)
He has been the Editor of the ISPS’s scientific journal ‘Psychosis’ for 14 years.