Ian Brockington (born 1935) is a British
psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are physicians and evaluate patients to determine whether their sy ...
.
Education and career
Ian Fraser Brockington was educated at
Winchester College
Winchester College is a public school (fee-charging independent day and boarding school) in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It was founded by William of Wykeham in 1382 and has existed in its present location ever since. It is the oldest of the ...
and
Gonville and Caius College Cambridge. He received his medical training at
Manchester University.
His
doctoral thesis was on 'Heart muscle disease'.
He spent four years in
Ibadan
Ibadan (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Oyo State, in Nigeria. It is the third-largest city by population in Nigeria after Lagos and Kano, with a total population of 3,649,000 as of 2021, and over 6 million people within its me ...
, Nigeria, alternating with training posts at the
Royal Postgraduate Medical School with Professor Goodwin;
this resulted in a number of papers on African heart diseases.
On his return he switched to
psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. See glossary of psychiatry.
Initial psych ...
, with training at the
Maudsley Hospital. He worked with the late
Robert Evan Kendell on
schizoaffective disorders and wrote a series of papers on the
nosology
Nosology () is the branch of medical science that deals with the classification of diseases. Fully classifying a medical condition requires knowing its cause (and that there is only one cause), the effects it has on the body, the symptoms that ...
of the
psychoses
Psychosis is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavior t ...
. As Senior Lecturer at the
Victoria University of Manchester he developed an interest in mother–infant psychiatry. After
visiting professorships
In academia, a visiting scholar, visiting researcher, visiting fellow, visiting lecturer, or visiting professor is a scholar from an institution who visits a host university to teach, lecture, or perform research on a topic for which the visitor ...
in
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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and St Louis, he was appointed to the Chair of Psychiatry at the
University of Birmingham
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. There he developed a community-based clinical service for mothers, backed by an inpatient mother and baby unit and day hospital. He had
sabbaticals
A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work.
The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Biblical practice of ''shmita'' (sabbatical year), which is related to agriculture. According to ...
as Cottman Fellow in
Monash University
Monash University () is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named for prominent World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university has a ...
, and ''
locum tenens'' consultant at the mother and baby unit in
Christchurch
Christchurch ( ; mi, Ōtautahi) is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand and the seat of the Canterbury Region. Christchurch lies on the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula on Pegasus Bay. The Avon River / ...
, New Zealand.
Professional associations
He helped to found, and was the first President of, the Marcé Society, and founded the Section on Women's Mental Health in the
World Psychiatric Association
The World Psychiatric Association is an international umbrella organisation of psychiatric societies.
Objectives and goals
Originally created to produce world psychiatric congresses, it has evolved to hold regional meetings, to promote profess ...
. He has established three anonymous patient panels: Action on Puerperal Psychosis, Action on Menstrual Psychosis, and Action on Bonding Disorders.
Since his retirement from clinical and university work in 2001, he had visiting professorships in
Nagoya
is the largest city in the Chūbu region, the fourth-most populous city and third most populous urban area in Japan, with a population of 2.3million in 2020. Located on the Pacific coast in central Honshu, it is the capital and the most pop ...
(with Professor Honjo) and
Kumamoto (with Professor Kitamura).
He chaired a World Psychiatric Association taskforce on
child protection.
Publishing
With a hobby of
bookbinding
Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book of codex format from an ordered stack of ''signatures'', sheets of paper folded together into sections that are bound, along one edge, with a thick needle and strong thread. Cheaper, b ...
, he established Eyry Press. He has written six
monographs on the psychiatry of
childbearing
Pregnancy is the time during which one or more offspring develops ( gestates) inside a woman's uterus (womb). A multiple pregnancy involves more than one offspring, such as with twins.
Pregnancy usually occurs by sexual intercourse, but ca ...
.
Menstrual psychosis is a
medical condition that Brockinton proposed for a periodic display of
psychosis
Psychosis is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavior ...
with acute onset in a particular phase of the
menstrual cycle
The menstrual cycle is a series of natural changes in hormone production and the structures of the uterus and ovaries of the female reproductive system that make pregnancy possible. The ovarian cycle controls the production and release of eggs a ...
.
It is proposed as a form of severe
mental illness
A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitti ...
, whose clinical features resemble those of the common form of
postpartum psychosis; since most cases are considered to belong to the
bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder, previously known as manic depression, is a mental disorder characterized by periods of depression and periods of abnormally elevated mood that last from days to weeks each. If the elevated mood is severe or associated with ...
spectrum, it is not a "disease in its own right".
[ The literature describes nearly 200 proposed cases as of 2020.] Episodes of menstrual psychosis have a sudden onset in a previously asymptomatic person, and are usually of brief duration, with full recovery.[ In most patients, Brockington states that menstrual psychosis is a self-limiting disorder, affecting only a small proportion of the 400 menstrual cycles in a woman’s life.
]
References
Book sources
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brockington, Ian
1935 births
Living people
British psychiatrists
Academics of the University of Birmingham
Place of birth missing (living people)
British expatriates in Nigeria
Academics of the University of Manchester
British expatriates in the United States