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David Enoch: campaigning psychiatrist whose book Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes became a medical classic

bmj · 2025-10-03 · canonical JSON source

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David Enoch was a doctor who made ministers flinch. “I was a troublemaker,” he recalled decades later, “But it was the only way to get changes made.” It was in 1965, when he took a consultant psychiatry post at Shelton Hospital in Shrewsbury, that he was first exposed to the geriatric wards hidden from public view. Here he introduced regular teaching and therapeutic communities—a democratic, participative group approach—and piloted one of Britain’s first care in the community schemes. He identified a core of progressive psychiatrists in other parts of the country, and they exchanged ideas.