About

Dirk Richter was born in 1962 in Lengerich, Westphalia (Germany), where he attended school and lived until his twenties. After completing his community service working in the nursing department of an ENT clinic, he trained as a nurse at what was then the Lengerich State Hospital (a psychiatric clinic, now the LWL Hospital Lengerich). Before studying sociology, philosophy and psychology at the University of Münster from 1988, he worked for a short time as a nurse in an acute care ward for alcohol and illegal drug addiction. He graduated in 1994 with a sociology dissertation on the function of the ‘nation’ in modern society. 

After completing his studies, he worked as a quality manager and research assistant at the LWL Hopsital in Münster. His research at that time focused on violence in the healthcare sector, mental health care care and psychiatric epidemiology. At the same time, he taught at the University of Münster, where he obtained his habilitation in General Sociology in 2003. His habilitation thesis was an assessment of the role of sociology in psychiatric research and care. After several years as a senior lecturer, Dirk Richter began academic work at Bern University of Applied Sciences in 2007, where he took up a full-time professorship in 2009. From then on, his academic work focused on mental health care, with a particular emphasis on psychiatric nursing. 

From 2015 until the end of 2024, he headed the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Research Group at the University Psychiatric Services in Bern. There, he produced numerous empirical and theoretical contributions on residential and occupational rehabilitation for people with mental health issues. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the research group conducted various epidemiological studies on mental health during the pandemic. 

Since early 2025, Dirk Richter has served first as Head and then as Co-Head of the ‘Mental Health and Psychiatric Care’ research group at Bern University of Applied Sciences, whilst also holding the position of Senior Researcher at the University Psychiatric Services in Bern. In addition, since spring 2025, he has been a visiting professor in the Department of Nursing and Public Health at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK. His research and publications focus primarily on the development of research methods and the use of coercion in psychiatry and general medicine.