His research interests include: attitudes towards 'mental illness', psycho-social causes of psychosis, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in psychology.
Read is the editor of Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Schizophrenia (Routledge, 2004) which has sold over 10,000 copies and been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
In 2010 he received the New Zealand Psychological Society's Sir Thomas Hunter Award for 'excellence in scholarship, research and professional achievement'.
[1][2] In 2010, Read and Richard Bentall co-authored a literature review on "The effectiveness of electroconvulsive therapy" (ECT).
[3] The authors said "given the strong evidence of persistent and, for some, permanent brain dysfunction, primarily evidenced in the form of retrograde and anterograde amnesia, and the evidence of a slight but significant increased risk of death, the cost-benefit analysis for ECT is so poor that its use cannot be scientifically justified".