My friend Jim Watson, who has died aged 80, was a committed psychiatrist who inspired generations of students and trainees, psychologists and nurses with his combination of humanity and applied scientific rigour.
Jim was born and brought up in London, the son of Hubert Watson, a teacher, and his wife, Grace, a doctor. From the Roan School for Boys in Greenwich, he went to study medicine at Trinity College, Cambridge. He moved to King’s College hospital medical school for his clinical studies, where he met Christine Colley, a fellow student. Jim qualified in 1960 and married Christine two years later.
After higher training in medicine he studied under Aubrey Lewis at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley hospital and was appointed consultant and senior lecturer in psychiatry at St George’s hospital in 1971.
Three years later he was appointed to the chair of psychiatry at Guy’s hospital, and was subsequently head of the academic department of psychiatry of the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy’s and St Thomas’s. While training at the Maudsley, he was influenced by the poet and psychotherapist Bob Hobson and by Douglas Bennett and Jim Birley, pioneers in community psychiatry.
As a result of his enthusiasm for teaching, a higher proportion of medical students at Guy’s opted for psychiatry as a career than in any other medical school.
Jim deplored the absence of training about sexuality for medical students and trainees and he established a popular course on this topic. Together with Christine, a consultant and senior lecturer in sexual and reproductive healthcare, he established a new sex and relationship problem clinic at Guy’s.
Jim described himself as a “Christian agnostic” and he promoted “respectful conversation” as an essential therapeutic tool, influenced by Samuel Tuke, the Quaker. He detested cant and bureaucracy and believed that psychiatrists had to tolerate partial knowledge, uncertainty and ambiguity. They always needed to be aware, he said, that all they were doing was making a best guess about what the trouble is, what caused it, what should be done about it and what was going to happen in the future.
When interviewed in 1974 for his professorial post at Guy’s he was asked: “What is the most important science underpinning psychiatry?” He replied psychology, but after 25 years working in a deprived inner-city area, he concluded that sociology is a more useful discipline. In a recent lecture, he reminded his audience that most of the beneficial effect of any type of psychotherapy is attributable to non-specific factors, particularly “accurate empathy” and “positive regard”.
After his retirement in 2000, Jim and Christine moved to the Cotswolds. As a keen gardener he grew vegetables. He was also active in his local church, in a patient support group and as a trustee of the Soundwell music therapy trust.
He is survived by Christine, their four sons, Peter, Andrew, John and Robert, and seven grandchildren.
Jim Watson obituary
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