Professor William Yule

William Yule is Professor of Applied Child Psychology University of London, Institute of Psychiatry; Formerly Head of Clinical Psychology Services The Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital.

He trained as a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry and Maudsley Hospital in London. He spent six years in educational and epidemiological research before returning to the staff at the Institute of Psychiatry. He received his doctoral degree for his studies of specific reading retardation, part of the Isle of Wight epidemiological studies. He has published over 300 articles and 9 books on a wide range of topics in child psychology.

He has researched into training parents of autistic children to use behavioural techniques; training teachers to use behavioural techniques in mainstream classrooms; treatment of school phobia; longitudinal studies of the epidemiology of children's disorders; the effects of lead on children's development; children's fears. He is a founder member of the Society for the Study of Behavioural Phenotypes, a society devoted to the better understanding of the genotype/phenotype link in certain mentally handicapping disorders.

For the past thirteen years, he has been heavily involved in the study and treatment of PTSD in both adults and children. He has studied the effects of the capsize of the cross-channel car ferry, Herald of Free Enterprise and the sinking of the cruise ship, Jupiter, in Athens harbour. He has shown that PTSD is both a commoner and more chronic reaction in children and adolescents than had hitherto been suspected. Since the summer of 1993, he has been an advisor to UNICEF on its psychosocial programme for war affected children in former Yugoslavia and is Technical Director of a major programme to develop services for war affected children in Mostar in Bosnia. He has been active among British and European PTSD researchers He has currently developed links with researchers in the countries of the former Soviet Union and together with colleagues in Gent and Leiden is helping to set up training in clinical child psychology in the University of Kiev in the Ukraine.

He was Chair of the Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry 1996-1999. He was elected to the Green Cross Foundation Academy of Traumatology in January 1998. He was appointed Honorary Consultant in Clinical Psychology to the Army in March 2000.

He was an expert witness in the Herald of Free Enterprise Arbitration and has appeared as an expert witness in Personal Injury cases in the High Court, in Child Care cases in Magistrates Courts and in the Family Division, in criminal cases in the Old Bailey. He takes instructions from both plaintiffs and defendants.