Wing, John

   (1923–)

   One of the key figures in social psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, Wing received his M.D. and Ph.D. from University College London. After serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he joined the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley and from 1965 to 1989 was director of the MRC Social Psychiatry Unit there. From 1989 to 1994, he headed the research unit of the Royal College of Physicians.

   Under John Wing’s supervision, in January 1965 the Social Psychiatry Unit launched the Camberwell Register (initiated in 1964 by Lorna Wing), which was to become a storehouse of information on the uptake of psychiatric services by in- and outpatients (Camberwell is a London district). Further, the Social Psychiatry Unit turned to the social and psychological circumstances under which patients with schizophrenia relapse; specially unfavorable for the prognosis is exposure to high levels of "expressed emotion" within families, meaning emotional over-involvement from which patients withdraw. To measure the psychopathology of schizophrenia, in 1961 Wing published in the Journal of Mental Science, "A Simple and Reliable Subclassification of Chronic Schizophrenia." This began the research that eventuated in a 1967 article by Wing and other members of his group in the British Journal of Psychiatry (the new title of the Journal of Mental Science) on "measuring and classifying ‘present psychiatric state.’ " An earlier draft of this had formed the basis of the World Health Organization’s international pilot study of schizophrenia, launched in 1965. In 1970, Wing and sociologist George William Brown (1930–), a professor at the Social Research Unit of Bedford College, University of London, wrote a widely cited study, Institutionalism and Schizophrenia, showing the vulnerability of schizophrenics to an understimulating environment, whether in an institution or outside. Simultaneously in 1970, he co-authored with London psychiatrist Edward H. Hare (1917–1996) a standard textbook, Psychiatric Epidemiology.