Clinic for General and Social Psychiatry

Curriculum vitae

Wulf Rössler is a full Professor of Clinical and Social Psychiatry at the University of Zurich since 1996 and the chairman of the Department for Social and General Psychiatry, which is part of the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich. He has been the chairman of the Medical Directorate from 1999 to 2003. He has taken the chair again since 2009.

Since 2009 he is the Research Director of “The Zurich Program for Sustainable Development of Mental Health Services”, which is a comprehensive research programme with seven projects reaching from psychiatric epidemiology to intensive case management, supported employment and early recognition and treatment (www.zinep.ch). He is a fellow of the Collegium Helveticum since October 2009. In 2007 and 2008 he has been a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of Sao Paulo. Since April 2010 he is a Visiting Professor at the Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Born 1947 near Heidelberg, he studied at first medicine in Heidelberg and subsequently psychology, which he completed with the MSc. In 1981 he started his training in psychiatry at the Central Institute for Mental Health in Mannheim (Germany) and finished his training in 1992 as a specialist for general psychiatry and psychotherapy. Additionally he received specialised training in social medicine and rehabilitation. In 1993 he habilitated with a topic “Social Rehabilitation of Schizophrenic Patients”, a topic, which emerged from his time when he was the Research Director of a state-wide model program with 43 model institutions to be evaluated between 1982 and 1987.

Accordingly he consecutively focussed on mental health services research. After having taken his new position in Zurich, he concentrated his research more and more in the area of psychiatric epidemiology. He has published more than 450 papers. He is the editor of several educational textbooks, for example in the field of psychiatric rehabilitation and emergency psychiatry. He is also the author of several monographies.

Wulf Rössler is on the scientific board of several scientific journals. He is also on the board of the Institute of Health and Substance Abuse Research, the Association of Psychiatric Chief Physicians in Switzerland and he is the president of the Swiss Society of Psychiatric Epidemiology.