Maudsley Lecture | From the Functional Neurological Disorder clinic

Dr Anastasia Apostolou is a psychiatrist in Medical Psychotherapy and General Adult Psychiatry. She has trained as a psychoanalyst and is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society (Institute of Psychoanalysis), practicing as a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst and is working in the NHS as a Consultant Psychiatrist in Medical Psychotherapy. She has done her PhD in Neuroscience and has worked in Greece in general medical settings as well as in Neurology before training as a psychiatrist in London, including her Medical Psychotherapy training at the Maudsley Hospital.

She has a long standing interest in psychosomatic medicine; in addition to direct medical work, and in working in Liaison Psychiatry in tertiary care, she is currently working in the NHS in a deprived London area where the language of the organic symptom can occasionally be the only one allowed to express psychic distress. In both her previous Primary Care Liaison role in close collaboration with GPs and in her current consultant post in medical psychotherapy role, the function of the body as a communicator and multiply used object is absolutely central to her work. She is very interested in the way trauma impacts the body and its conceptualisation/integration.

Dr Tim Nicholson is a Reader in Neuropsychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London. He is an Honorary Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. His clinical and research work focuses on Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), immunopsychiatry, broader neuropsychiatric disorders including those resulting from COVID-19. He is on the executive committee of the faculty of neuropsychiatry of the RCPsych, the British Neuropsychiatry Association and Chair of the MSc in Clinical Neuropsychiatry at the IoPPN.