Psychiatrist led bid to reduce alcohol abuse
THROUGHOUT his psychiatry career Dr Bruce Ritson has seen face to face the problems caused by Scotland’s difficult relationship with alcohol.
“It leads to every sort of mayhem. There’s the destructive impact on family life – whether it’s the husband or wife or both,” he says. “It has a devastating effect on work, on crime with alcohol a prevalent factor in violent crime in particular, on physical health but also mental health and brain damage.”
Inspired by the anti-smoking movement and its success at highlighting the health implications of tobacco, Mr Ritson and a group of colleagues formed the Scottish Intercollegiate Group on Alcohol, an informal group of doctors from Scotland’s medical colleges with an interest in raising awareness of the dangers of alcohol abuse. The group later became Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (SHAAP) in 2006.
As chairman of the organisation, Dr Ritson became a key figure in bringing attention to the scale of Scotland’s difficult relationship with alcohol, highlighting its physical and mental health implications as well as social impact. With colleagues, including the late Evelyn Gillan, the organisation’s director before moving to Alcohol Focus Scotland as chief executive, Dr Ritson helped push forward the argument for minimum pricing of alcohol.
Dr Ritson completed his basic medical and postgraduate training at Edinburgh University and Harvard Medical School, later becoming a senior lecturer in psychiatry at Edinburgh University and consultant psychiatrist at Royal Edinburgh Hospital.
His motivation to campaign on alcohol issues came from seeing the difficulties it caused for patients and families, exacerbated, he says, by the relaxation of licensing laws in the eighties. “The emphasis was on making Scotland a more continental country. Maybe it did, but it didn’t stop old habits,” he says.
Now retired, Dr Ritson was awarded an OBE for his work in 2013.