John Deryk Pollitt

Short abstract

Psychiatrist who made major contributions to our understanding of depression

John Pollitt was the epitome of the London teaching hospital psychiatrist. His research drew attention to the wide variety of precipitants for depressive illness and the wide range of clinical pictures of the illness, which, he maintained, were not a product of the precipitant but a product of the individual patient's basic personality.

Figure 1.

He wrote one of the first monographs on depression (Depression, Heinemann, 1965), and later a Textbook of Psychological Medicine for Students (Churchill). He wrote several specialised chapters in general medical and psychiatric textbooks and many articles on depressive illness, anorexia nervosa, and dementia in The Practitioner and Hospital Medicine.

John was also in demand by publishers to assess submitted textbooks and plays with psychiatric themes. He gave several short talks on BBC radio and appeared on television in The Hurt Mind and Your Life in Their Hands.

Born in Plumstead, London, in 1926, John entered St Thomas' Hospital as a medical student in 1944. His undergraduate career was soon disrupted by pulmonary tuberculosis. This and a recurrence 18 months later in pre-antibiotic days led to two years of rest and the advice to relinquish his career. He used this time to study formal logic, social psychology, physiognomy, and craniometry, which laid the foundations of a broad approach in medicine.

After early training posts, he researched obsessional states and did seminal work on the hitherto relatively uncharted area of the natural history of mental disorder. His higher professional training continued at St Thomas' Hospital and in Northampton, before he returned to St Thomas' as chief assistant in the psychological medicine department in 1958.

In 1959 he was awarded a Rockefeller travelling fellowship to study the natural history of depression at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and at Harvard. While there, he formulated the concept of the “functional shift” in depression, drawing attention to the physiological effects of the illness not seen in unhappiness. His pioneering paper on this concept, “Depression and the Functional Shift,” appeared in 1960.

Shortly after his return from the United States, in 1961, he was appointed to the consultant staff at St Thomas' Hospital. In 1983 he was appointed medical director of a newly built private psychiatric hospital in west Kent.

He leaves a wife, Erica; two daughters; and his grandchildren.

John Deryk Pollitt, former physician in charge department of psychological medicine, St Thomas' Hospital, London (b London 1926; q St Thomas' 1950; MD, FRCP, FRCPsych), died from a heart attack on 9 February 2005.