The Joshua Bierer Archive

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Reference number	BIERER
Level of description	Collection
Date(s)	Creation: 1930-1984
Extent and medium	7 boxes (approx)
Category	Personal Papers
Scope and content	┆Personal papers of Doctor Joshua Bierer including a selection of his personal papers as well as Bierer's draft autobiography.
History	Doctor Joshua Bierer was a psychiatrist and pioneer in social psychiatry with a special interest in community care and the rehabilitation of mental patients with chronic disabilities. He was born in 1901 in Radautz, Austria, to a distinguished family of medical professionals. He trained in Individual Psychology with Professor Alfred Adler and Dr A. Neuer in Austria before taking up a post at Berlin's Teaching Institute in Individual Psychology in 1928. He continued to work in mental hospitals in Vienna and was awarded his Doctor of Medicine in 1938. In the same year, Bierer fled to England to escape Nazism and became the first psychotherapist in a public mental hospital by taking up an appointment at Runwell Hospital. Here, he created one of the first therapeutic communities. In 1946 he founded the Marlborough Day Hospital, a social psychotherapy centre and the first of this kind in the world. He was also founder the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, the Institute of Social Psychiatry, and the British Association of Social Psychiatry. Bierer died on 22 November 1984.
Name of creator(s)	Joshua Bierer
Access status	OPEN
Records held elsewhere	The majority of Dr Bierer's papers are held by the Wellcome Library. Their ref: PP/BIE.
Language	ENG