However, generating public and political acceptance of mental illness is another matter entirely.
Prof Nutt has been embroiled in several high-profile disputes during his career, especially in the fraught area of addictive drugs and mental illness.
``I think a lot of people don't believe in psychiatry because they would like it to not be true; they would like people to snap out of it,'' Prof Nutt - in New Zealand on a William Evans Fellowship - said.
``They would like it to be something which could be thought through and solved, but mental illness is not like that unfortunately.
``There is a stigma about psychiatry and, if anything, it's getting stronger despite the advances in neuroscience, and I am going to talk about how we can use our understanding of the brain to destigmatise psychiatry.''
Prof Nutt, the author of 27 books, 27 government reports and more than 400 research papers, said advances in scanning technology meant doctors could now watch the brain at work, and how it reacted to different stimuli.
He hoped that would create a ``third era'' of psychiatry, where the mental health field would move beyond strictly psychotherapeutical or biological approaches to mental health and combine the best of both approaches.
Moving perceptions of psychiatry is one thing, but changing people's attitudes to addictive substances is quite another.
Prof Nutt, who is speaking in Dunedin tomorrow evening, previously made headlines for questioning government reclassification of drugs, and for a flippant comment that an addiction to horse riding was statistically more dangerous than an addiction to MDMA (ecstasy).
``Addiction had a very powerful stigma attached to it; there is very little sympathy for people who use drugs because the argument is that if you hadn't used them you wouldn't have got addicted,'' Prof Nutt said.
``There are many factors which protect you against drug abuse; if you are very, very rich and can walk in to a job in Parliament you can stop, but if you have got nothing to do it is much harder to stop.''
He has also battled to gain acceptance for his work examining the effect of drugs on the brain.
``There had been almost 40 years of people using MDMA and no-one had ever studied it, and if you asked the Government for money to study it they would say no, it's a recreational drug.'' he said.
