Rate My Professor Giles Newton-Howes

Associate Professor Giles Newton-Howes serves as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Otago, Wellington, part of the Division of Health Sciences. He earned his MBChB in medicine from the University of Otago in 1998, along with BA and BSc degrees, and completed his PhD there in 2018 with a thesis titled 'The issues and impact of personality on mental state disorder.' Newton-Howes underwent specialist training in psychiatry at Imperial College London, completing five years of clinical work, and holds qualifications including MRCPsych, FRANZCP, and CCT in Adult Psychiatry and Substance Misuse Psychiatry from the UK. As a general adult consultant psychiatrist with a sub-specialty in substance misuse psychiatry, he is seconded half-time to the Wellington public health system and affiliates with the University of Otago Bioethics Centre.

Newton-Howes' academic interests center on the clinical dimensions of personality disorders, substance misuse, and the interplay between human rights and psychiatric practice, encompassing coercion, community treatment orders, patient autonomy, and ethical implications of mental health legislation. In 2016, he was awarded the University of Otago Early Career Award. His scholarly output includes the book Personality Disorders (Oxford Psychiatry Library) and over 160 peer-reviewed publications, among them 'Personality disorder across the life course' (The Lancet, 2015), 'The futility of risk prediction in psychiatry' (British Journal of Psychiatry, 2016), 'Suicide and self-harm' (2022), 'Personality disorder prevalence and correlates in a whole of nation dataset' (2021), 'Personality disorder and treatment outcome in alcohol use disorder' (2018), and 'Making the World of Difference: a service user-led education programme' (2020). These works have amassed more than 5,400 citations according to ResearchGate. He convenes the MBChB Year 6 psychological medicine module, incorporating the service user-led 'Making the World of Difference' programme to reshape psychiatric education through immersive clinical experiences, team-based learning, and patient interactions. His contributions extend to editorial roles and public lectures, such as on borderline personality disorder and consent ethics.