Profile: Derek Summerfield — politics and psychiatry

Abstract

Presents a brief summary of an interview with Derek Summerfield. He is an outspoken critic of what he describes as the complicity of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) and Israeli doctors posted to interrogation units in relation to the torture of Palestinian refugees, which has led to him receiving many accusations of anti-Semitism and becoming the subject of a libel suit by the President of the IMA. He is a member of the Critical Psychiatry Network. Before training in psychiatry, he worked as a government medical officer in Zimbabwe to ‘repay his debt’ to Africa. This was clearly going to be an encounter with a man of the left, passionate about social justice.