Steve Wright holds a BSc (Hons) in social psychology, an additional Diploma in psychology, a PGDip in research methods, and an MSc in legal and forensic psychology. He has also undertaken specialist training in Personal Construct Psychology.
After graduating Steve worked in a family support service for people with learning disabilities, and then in NHS hospital administration. He then worked as a nursing assistant in an inpatient adolescent unit, as an assistant psychologist in a community learning disability setting, and then as an assistant psychologist in an inpatient intensive psychiatric rehabilitation unit.
He began work in mental health research in 1993, mainly at the Institute of Psychiatry. He has conducted research in community, inpatient, and prison settings, and been involved in research in the following areas:
- Continuity of community psychiatric care.
- Acute inpatient services (including the Safewards randomised controlled trial).
- Comorbid serious mental illness and drug/alcohol use (dual diagnosis).
- Advance care directives.
- Violence risk assessment in community settings.
- Prevention and management of violence in inpatient settings.
- Comparing service use, risk, and clinical need in service users under the care of generic community and community forensic mental health teams.
- Prison mental health, and attempted suicide in prison.
- Mental health in learning disability.
- Health economic costs of mental health-related stigma and discrimination.
- Psychotropic PRN medication in inpatient mental health.
- Staff views concerning ‘difficult’ mental health inpatients.
- Service users’ views concerning staff behaviour in acute psychiatry.
- The evaluation of an innovative primary care mental health service.
Steve has been involved with the Centre since taking up a Research Assistant post with the Department of Mental Health and Social Work at Middlesex University in 2019. His work for the Centre includes contributions to a paper on nursing and midwifery managers’ perceptions of what constitutes compassionate management behaviour and to the report on media coverage of spiritual support for hospitalised Covid-19 patients at the height of the pandemic in early 2020, and to papers on staff views on the training needs associated with robots in health and social care, and on the benefits of robots in health and social care.