The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist mental health trust based in north London. The Trust specialises in talking therapies. The education and training department caters for 2,000 students a year from the United Kingdom and abroad. The Trust is based at the Tavistock Centre in Swiss Cottage. The founding organisation was the Tavistock institute of medical psychology founded in 1920 by Dr. Hugh Crichton-Miller. It has long been regarded as a professional centre of excellence of international renown, in its application of psychoanalytic ideas to the study and treatment of mental health and interpersonal dynamics.The institution is notable for the great number of publications that have issued from it and its continuing engagement in a broad dialogue on the major social issues of the day. Its approaches have in the past been seen to be influential in the British Army, the English Prison Service, aspects of the judicial system, the Probation Service, in Education, Social Services, the National Health Service, in management consulting across industry and in the arts. Its signal attribute has been the multidisciplinary approach to its work.
Threats to the Clinic's organisational and financial survival have surfaced from time to time. At one such juncture, in 1994, it joined forces with the neighbouring Portman Clinic in Fitzjohn's Avenue. The Portman specialises in areas of forensic psychiatry, including the treatment of addictive, sociopathic and criminal behaviours and tendencies.
