MHISIG is a special interest group of the Royal College of
Psychiatrists and works alongside the Informatics Committee to
promote the use of information technologies to improve mental
health care.
We aim to appeal to a membership with a broad range of skills
and experience. Through our IT skills workshops we teach basic uses
of software packages such as word processing and
presentation software, as well as more advanced
uses tailored to mental health care e.g. statistics
packages, reference management packages and research.
We encourage exchange of ideas and innovation through our
discussion forum and newsletter. We are also involved in
establishing mental health informatics on the curriculum for
trainees as well as CPD. MHISIG has produced publications including
the Connect newsletter and a book. In the future we intend to focus our
efforts on blogging content on these pages.
Membership
Membership is open to anyone with an interest in informatics
within the field of mental health. You do not need to be a college
member or indeed a psychiatrist. Details of joining can be found on
the contact us page.
Committee members
Dr Zia Nadeem - Chair
Dr John Brady - Secretary
Dr Matt Evans - Education, Publications & Website
Dr Fionnbar Lenihan - Publications
Dr Justin Marley - Publications
Dr Omer Moghraby
Dr Nigel McKenzie - Treasurer
Should you wish to contact any of the committee members please
use the contact us page.
MHISIG documents
Details of minutes from meetings can be found on the MHISIG documents page.
History
The Mental Health Informatics Group was formed in 1983 and
became a Special Interest Group of the College (Computers in
Psychiatry Special Interest Group or CIPSIG) in 1987. The
group held annual conferences, published a regular newsletter and
held Internet workshops at the College Annual Meetings. In 1995 the
Computers in Mental Health (CIMH) website was created by Martin
Briscoe and Carl Littlejohns. It expanded to contain an extensive
database of computing applications used in Mental Health. An email
discussion group was also created which eventually became known as
CIMH2000. Both website and discussion list were decomissioned in
2003.
In the autumn 1999 newsletter (produced by the then
chair Martin Baggaley) membership of CIPSIG was
noted to be approximately 250. Since then the membership has
steadily grown to more than 1500 and continues to rise.
In 2005 a joint paper was produced by the chair of
CIPSIG Matt Evans and the chair of the Informatics Committee Martin
Elphick proposing a structure whereby the two groups could
work together more cohesively. The paper was accepted early in 2006
along with a change of name from CIPSIG to MHISIG (Mental
Health Informatics Special Interest Group) to reflect the
increasing importance of the formal topic of health informatics in
our members' working lives.