Thursday, July 10, 2014

Death of founding editor of Asylum Magazine announced

Professor Alec Jenner, founding editor of Asylum Magazine, died on July 3rd. The funeral service will be held in St Nicholas Church, High Bradfield, Sheffield on Wednesday 16th July at 12:00. Following the funeral service the family would like to invite attendees to join them at the Old Horns, Towngate, Jane St., High Bradfield, Sheffield where refreshments will be served and where good memories of Alec can be shared.

I'm particularly sorry to hear of his death. In 1989, he appointed me Lecturer in Psychiatry in Sheffield University, when nowhere else wanted me for senior registrar training. He was professor there for 25 years. He organised regular fortnightly outside speakers in term time on Tuesday evenings, which Tim Kendall and I carried on after he retired, until I left Sheffield in 1996. 

Alec's contribution to critical psychiatry was immense. He may have preferred to call it democratic psychiatry following Franco Basaglia. More to follow to honour his life and work, but for the moment look at his own view as a psychiatrist from the alternative textbook of psychiatry, which Lin Bigwood and he helped Phil Virden to write.

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