James Patrick Watson MD, FRCP, FRCPsych

James (Jim) Watson, who died after a stroke on 3 August 2016 aged 80, was among a small band of British psychiatrists who trained in the 1960s and 70s to take psychiatry out of the asylums and establish robust services in general hospital and community settings. They were also responsible for developing a wide range of specialist mental health services. Jim was deeply committed to improving the standards of clinical care, from early implementation of behavioural therapy through in-patient group therapies and the understanding and management of behaviour on hospital wards. He championed the relationship between staff and patient as key to recovery in psychiatry, deploring the move to ever fewer acute beds, reductions in staffing levels and organisational changes that resulted in fractured continuity of care and consequent erosion of the essence of good mental healthcare. His clinical interest was reflected in his research, which included evaluations of community mental health, telemedicine and treatments for psychosexual disorders, for which he established one of the earliest specialist multidisciplinary clinics and training programmes in Britain. With his personal style, he led a vibrant, outward-facing, creative and very happy department, in which a serious commitment to excellence went along with a refreshing lack of pomposity and a keen sense of work being enjoyable. This was in no small part due to Jim's dedication to improving the quality of psychiatric services, not least by ensuring excellence in the education and training of psychiatrists and by making sure that medical students had a varied and stimulating exposure to psychiatry. Under his leadership, Guy's Hospital Medical School had the enviable reputation of having the highest proportion of medical students opting for a career in psychiatry. In the postgraduate field, he was an inspirational leader of the South East of England training scheme for psychiatry, chairman of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Specialist Training Committee and chairman of the Association of University Teachers of Psychiatry. In the mid-1990s he launched an MSc in mental health studies-a programme directed at professionals from all disciplines involved in delivering mental health services. This course was extraordinarily successful: consistently oversubscribed, with unprecedented numbers of applicants. Its success spawned further collaborations with university departments overseas, notably in Egypt and the Middle East, where he worked with colleagues to develop a diploma in psychiatric practice for wider dissemination across the region. His determination to improve mental healthcare led him to a lengthy …