Derek Summerfield
Derek Summerfield is a London-based psychiatrist known for his work on how war, torture, and displacement affect mental health. He holds honorary roles at the Institute of Psychiatry and on the Executive Committee of the Transcultural Special Interest Group at the Royal College of Psychiatry, and he is an Honorary Fellow of the Egyptian Psychiatric Association. He has written about 150 papers and other contributions to medical and social sciences.
Born in South Africa, he trained in medicine at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London. In his career, he has served as Principal Psychiatrist with the Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture in London, as an Honorary Senior Lecturer at St George’s Hospital Medical School, and as a consultant to Oxfam on projects in war-affected settings. He was a Research/Teaching Associate for the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.
In 1995 he participated in a study on the psychiatric effects of detention and torture of Palestinian political prisoners. He has worked on many studies about the effects of war, atrocity, displacement, and asylum in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Bosnia, and the UK. He has written extensively about the effects of torture and of violence against women and children in war.
Summerfield drew international attention by questioning whether post-traumatic stress disorder is always the right lens for trauma, criticizing the medicalization of trauma psychotherapy, and arguing that mental health statistics should reflect different cultural understandings. He has argued that global mental health data should take ethnopsychiatric differences into account.
He has been a vocal critic of the Israeli government’s actions toward Palestinians and of what he sees as violations of medical ethics by some Israeli physicians. A British Medical Journal editorial in 2004 about violence against Palestinian children sparked controversy. He also sought, unsuccessfully, to press for the resignation of Yoram Blachar as head of the World Medical Association over concerns about torture.
Summerfield is a member of the UK branch of the International Critical Psychiatry Network.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 14:08 (CET).