Pau Pérez-Sales

Pau Perez-Sales is a psychiatrist and former director of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid's Post-Doctoral Degree in Mental Health in Political Violence and Catastrophe (1999–2024) . He is also affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry Hospital La Paz in Madrid and Clinical Director of SiR, Centre for research, forensic documentation and rehabilitation of ill-treatment and torture victims.

Education Pau Perez-Sales holds a degree in medicine at the University of Barcelona and did a speciality in psychiatry at Hospital La Paz, Madrid, In 1994, he received his PhD in Psychiatry from the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Research and career Pau Pérez-Sales is a former Chair of the Section on Psychological Consequences of Persecution and Torture of the World Psychiatric Association. He has conducted extensive research on the operational application of scientific research on torture and psychological torture. He coined the term "torturing environments" and developed tools to study them

He worked as a consultant for the World Health Organization, the Inter Agency Standing Committee group on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings , MH-GAP Intervention Guide Rapid Assessment in Emergencies Program and coordinated MHPSS programs for Doctors of the World and Médecins Sans Frontières.

His other research interests include psychotherapy in individual and community trauma, transcultural psychiatry, post-traumatic factors, and resilience. He developed the VIVO Questionnaire as an integrative tool for assessing the impact of traumatic experiences on identity and worldviews and has trained and led research in more than 20 countries.

Since the late 1980s, Pérez-Sales has been associated with Liberation Psychology in Latin America, living and working in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Chile and Colombia working with grassroot organizations, authoring books and articles related to enforced disappearances, exhumation of mass graves and policies of truth and reparation.

Memberships Pérez-Sales was a member of the international Steering Committee of the Principles on Effective Interviewing for Investigations and Information Gathering, known as the Méndez Principles, a set of standards for non-coercive interviewing developed between 2018 and 2021.

Since 2010, he has served as Expert Advisor to Spain's National Preventive Mechanism (NPM), part of the Office of the Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo), participating in multidisciplinary monitoring visits to detention facilities and producing studies on solitary confinement and ill-treatment.

Pau Perez-Sales is Editor-in-Chief of Torture Journal, a peer-review biomedical and legal Journal published by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims.

Selected works (2026). Torturing Environments: Psychological, Clinical and Legal Dimensions. Routledge. ISBN 9781003639350. doi:10.4324/9781003639350. (2022). (2021). (2020). (2016). (2007). (2006). (2004). (2001). (1999). (1998).