Chris Brewin - Biography#

His research addresses the processes underlying mental disorders and their treatment, combining psychology and neuroscience with detailed phenomenological study of mental contents. His most important contributions have been to clarify how memory for adverse experiences impacts on clinical disorders. In depression, his influential review (Brewin et al., 1993) demonstrated that there was no reason to distrust patients’ retrospective reports of childhood facts and events, legitimising discoveries about the psychological and biological effects of reported early adversity. His work also established for the first time that the pathway from early adversity to later depression was mediated by involuntary visual memories of those experiences (Brewin et al., 1999). The hitherto unknown presence of such memories in many different disorders is now established (Brewin et al., 2010). Past understanding of cognitive-behaviour therapy as correcting distorted thinking was replaced by a new account of therapy as altering the relative accessibility of negative and positive mental representations, regardless of their objective truth or falsity (Brewin, 2006). He was the first to show that distorting distressing memories to make them more positive could be successfully applied to treating depression (Brewin et al., 2009). He is best known for his dual representation theory of posttraumatic stress disorder, which explains the unusual symptoms such as flashbacks and the paradoxical effects of rehearsing trauma memories. The theory proposed that people register traumatic events both in episodic memory and in a perceptual memory system (Brewin et al., 1996), PTSD resulting from an imbalance in the two systems. The theory has now been integrated with a contemporary neuroscience model of spatial memory and imagery (Brewin et al., 2010). He played a leading role in the reformulation of PTSD and Complex PTSD in ICD-11, which greatly simplifies the diagnoses to achieve greater clinical utility worldwide (Maercker et al., 2013). He also designed and carried out the mental health response to the 2005 London bombings. Previous failures to identify and treat affected people were addressed through active outreach and screening, an approach which has been highly influential.