Professor Christopher C H Cook

Chris Cook qualified in medicine from St George’s Hospital Medical School, London in 1981 He subsequently undertook postgraduate training in psychiatry at the United Medical & Dental Schools of Guys and St Thomas’s in London and specialised in the field of addictions. His MD thesis was on the genetic predisposition to alcohol misuse, and he published widely in the field of alcohol misuse and addiction. More recently his PhD in theology was concerned with the Orthodox tradition of prayer and its relationship to the field of (what would in contemporary western discourse be called) psychotherapy. He has always been interested in spiritual aspects of addiction but his more recent work has been focussed more broadly on spirituality, theology & health. Chris was ordained as an Anglican Priest in 2001.

Chris was Senior Lecturer at the National Addictions Centre in London from 1994 to 1997, and Professor of the Psychiatry of Alcohol Misuse at the University of Kent from 1997 to 2003. He was Director of the Centre for Spirituality, Theology & Health at Durham University until his retirement in 2022. He was Director of the inter-disciplinary and inter-professional MA/MSc programme in Spirituality, Theology & Health at Durham University from 2012-2020, receiving an honorary mention in the Expanded Reason Awards in Rome in 2017. He was Chair of the Executive Committee of the Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists 2009-2013 (and again from 2021) and President of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality 2014-2018. He is an Honorary Chaplain with Tees, Esk & Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust. He is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University.

In 2020, Chris was awarded the Canterbury Cross by the Archbishop of Canterbury in recognition of services to the Church of England, particularly in relation to interdisciplinary work on theology and psychiatry. In 2021 he was recipient of the Oskar Pfister award from the American Psychiatric Association for outstanding contributions in the field of psychiatry and religion