Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Professor George Brown
Oration given on 12 July 2002
Chancellor, the Senate has resolved that the degree of Doctor
of the University be conferred upon Professor George Brown.
Professor George Brown is a distinguished medical sociologist whose main area
of work has been in the field of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia and
depression. It is particularly appropriate that we are honouring him at a time
when a new Department of Health and Human Sciences is just coming into
existence in the University. His work is scholarly in the best sense of
the word – meticulous, thorough and insightful. At the same time his
research has enormous social and practical relevance. Schizophrenia is a
major, severe and often debilitating mental disorder, whilst depression is now
said to be the most common mental health problem in Western societies.
George Brown’s work has considerably advanced our understanding of mental
illness; and has done so from a distinctively social perspective. His
research on depression established very convincingly the crucial role of social
factors in causing depression. It is now a commonplace that the stresses
and strains of living can lead individuals to become depressed, but the
scientific evidence for this type of connection owes much to the work of George
Brown and to his classic book written with Tirril Harris, Social Origins of
Depression, first published in 1978.
Born in Portobello, London, in 1930, George Brown was one of non-identical
twins. His father, a lens maker, belonged to what sociologists have sometimes
called the aristocracy of labour; his mother had been a waitress. As was
typical of other children from the working class in that period his pathway into
academia was by no means smooth, and his achievement is all the more impressive
for that. Though he went to Grammar School, the only boy from his area to
do so, this was prior to the Butler Education Act, and his parents had to pay a
fee. Like others in their situation they found this difficult and George
had to leave school at 16, having successfully matriculated, in order to
contribute to the family income. He initially moved between a number of
jobs, including work in the Post Office, as a shop boy in a bookshop, and as a
draughtsman in a heating and ventilating firm. In 1948, however, he was called
up for national service – in the Air Force. There, he reports, he began to
make friends for the first time and was encouraged by a friend to go to
university, preparing for the entrance examinations in English and Latin.
He went up to University College, London in 1951 – a time when a far smaller
proportion of the population went to University – studying archaeology and
anthropology. There he clearly flourished and impressed his teachers.
Yet, when he left University his path was still not straightforward. He
initially went into town planning, which he did not like, and followed this with
a six-months post with the Industrial Research Operations Unit. Then, on
the recommendation of one of his professors, he got a post at the Social
Psychiatry Research Unit at the Maudsley Hospital, London. There he began the
first phase of his research career studying chronic schizophrenia, the mental
illness then particularly associated with long stays in mental hospital.
In addition to generating his life-long interest in mental health, his
research at the Unit laid down some key features of his subsequent work.
First, working with psychologists and psychiatrists, gave him a commitment to
research that was properly scientific, and took measurement very seriously.
This was vital since it meant that psychiatrists, often sceptical of the work of
social scientists, have found it difficult to reject his research on
methodological grounds. Second, working in an interdisciplinary context
put him in what seems to have been a sometimes frustrating but highly creative
tension with academics from other disciplines. Third, his research at the
Unit gave him first hand experience of interviewing and made him realise the
importance of direct experience in fieldwork and hands on involvement in
research. Fourth, it gave him a commitment to exploring the social context
and meanings of actions and feelings, something that is often difficult to
capture within standardised questionnaires. And finally, the research
developed his interest in the expression emotions within family relationships.
One of his earliest research collaborators was the psychiatrist, J.K Wing.
The two carried out an important comparative study of the rehabilitation of
patients in three major mental hospitals, producing a joint book in 1970,
Institutionalism and Schizophrenia. This showed very effectively that a
more enriched social environment facilitated improvement in patients’
psychiatric state. A point of some interest given the location of this
University, is that one of the three mental hospitals in the study was Severalls
Hospital, Colchester, then headed by the charismatic psychiatrist Russell
Barton. The hospital closed in the late 1990s, but so far the building is
still standing.
With the benefit of hindsight, the late 1960s look to have been a turning
point in George Brown’s academic career. He moved from the Social
Psychiatry Research Unit at the Maudsley to the Social Research Unit at Bedford
College, London, where he became first Deputy Director, then joint Director.
This move is associated with a change in his intellectual identity from
anthropologist to sociologist, and the Unit established the first, and highly
influential, Masters degree in Medical Sociology in Britain. Finally, the period
is also linked to the shift from research on schizophrenia to work on clinical
depression – that is depression that involves a more severe set of symptoms than
grief or unhappiness – a shift designed to allow him to study the impact of life
events on individuals in the community.
George Brown’s commitment to careful, precise measurement alongside his
commitment to detailed, interviewing which plays proper attention to social
context and meaning came to clear fruition in his impressive and important book
with Tirril Harris, Social Origins of Depression. The book was largely
based on two surveys of women in Camberwell in London and explores class
differences in levels of depression – depression, like many other mental
illnesses, is more common amongst those from the lower social classes. Using a
sophisticated measure of the stressfulness of events, the research provided very
clear evidence that the observed class differences could be accounted for in
terms of two sets of factors: the life events experienced in the previous year,
and a set of four ‘vulnerability’ factors: the absence of a confiding
relationship, having three or more children under 14 to look after, not having
paid work outside the home, and the loss of one’s mother before the age of 11.
George Brown’s subsequent research has continued to be primarily in the field
of depression and he and his colleagues have generated a range of
comparative studies in the Outer Hebrides, Spain and Zimbabwe, as well as a
longitudinal study in Islington., studies which have generally replicated his
earlier findings. This work has also looked at other vulnerability factors such
as childhood neglect, as well as the factors facilitating recovery from
depression. In addition, he and his co-workers and students, have linked
stressful life-events to other illnesses, both mental and physical. A
collection of papers he and Tirril Harris published in 1989, Life Events and
Illness, included papers linking life events with anxiety, schizophrenia,
appendicitis, abdominal pain, multiple sclerosis, heart attacks, and speech
disorders as well as depression, and there is now a very broad range of work on
the psychosocial causation of illness.
Professor George Brown is an eminent sociologist whose highly influential
work serves as a model of excellence for social scientific research:
sophisticated, precise and authoritative.
Chancellor, I present to you Professor George Brown
Orator : Professor Joan Busfield