Professor John Werry
 Professor Werry is a third generation New Zealander and spent his early years in Southland, Ashburton and Dannevirke attending local schools there. His parents were school teachers and his maternal grandfather a doctor in Reefton. His paternal great grandmother was an outspoken supporter of the Temperance Movement and the Liberal Party which introduced the first social security legislation to NZ and also gave votes to women before the end of the 19th century. She and her husband also ran a boarding house in Timaru mostly for young single men without families in NZ She died in the Influenza epidemic of November 1919.
He graduated in medicine at Otago University Medical School in 1957 and studied psychiatry specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry at McGill Montreal where he graduated with distinction. He worked at the Montreal Children Hospital and then the University of Illinois. In 1970 when he was head of the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, he was appointed the first Professor and Head of the Psychiatry Dept at the University of Auckland Medical School.
He has nearly 200 publications and edited books in child and adolescent psychiatry doing some of the earliest research on ADHD, Conduct Disorder, early onset Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder and paediatric psychopharmacology.
He has lectured widely overseas and in NZ and has been a consultant to government organizations here and in the US. He is frequently consulted by print and other media in NZ
He worked at the Starship Children’s Hospital helping to establish the first inpatient unit for children and adolescents.
Prof Werry retired from the University in 1991 and since has devoted his time to starting and assisting a wide variety of mental health services for children and adolescents in a wide variety of places in NZ and advocating for proper mental health services for children and adolescents including a Centre of Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
In the last few years he has devoted his time mainly to the most disadvantaged children and youth in NZ. He believes that those that have the most complex problems in mental health deserve the best doctors and that those who have good luck incur an obligation to help those who have bad luck. He is a cofounder of the Youth Horizons Trust for youth with severe behaviour problems.
He currently works as a visiting consultant to the Eastern Bay of Plenty ,Tairawhiti and Counties Manukau District Health Boards and the Ngati Porou Hauora .
He has five children and 12 grandchildren. His interests outside medicine are gardening, beekeeping, sailing, NZ History, and watching rugby and cricket.
He is married to Dianne Moya Moffitt a school teacher.
Email: j.werry@auckland.ac.nz and his cellphone for urgent contacts is 027 496-0597
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