- Department of Psychology, London South Bank University, 103 Borough Rd, London SE1 OAA
Paula Reavey
London South Bank University, Psychology, Department Member
- Gender Studies, Clinical Psychology, Autobiographical Memory, Critical Psychology, Visual methodology, Feminism, and 44 moreMental Health, Spectroscopy of Cultural Heritage Objects, Social Psychology, Psychology, Memory Studies, Space and Place, Collective Memory, Feminist Theory, Sexual Violence, Material Culture Studies, Theoretical Psychology, Cultural Memory, Affect (Cultural Theory), Critical Social Psychology, Material Semiotics, Discourse Analysis, Actor Network Theory, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Social Remembering, Child Sexual Abuse, Qualitative Research, Embodiment, Discourse, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Trauma, PTSD, Veterans, Holocaust, Rape, Incest, Memory, Cultural Studies, Myth, Personal Narratives, Literary Theory, Women, Henri Bergson, Child Abuse, Agency (Psychology), Visual Methods, Visual, Sexuality, and Paul Connertonedit
Historically, nature has been considered central to healing and recovery in institutional mental health settings, with inpatient spaces designed to mirror the restorative forces nature may afford. Within contemporary healthcare... more
Historically, nature has been considered central to healing and recovery in institutional mental health settings, with inpatient spaces designed to mirror the restorative forces nature may afford. Within contemporary healthcare architecture, the discourse surrounding nature's role has once again become prominent, especially in the concept of 'healing architecture'. While the literature on 'healing architecture' primarily considers how to connect recovery to nature through interventions in the built environment, less interest has been directed towards how nature is configured in design processes and what implications that has for the everyday experiences of patients and staff. In this paper we consider the design and implementation of one particular psychiatric hospital in Denmark to show that the 'nature' brought into this healthcare space can be experienced as anything but 'natural' and may reduce rather than enhance a felt sense of 'vitality' amongst patients. Based on our analysis, we end the paper by suggesting four principles for future healthcare design.
Research Interests:
In this paper, we consider the changes to memorial practice for mental health service users, during the asylum period of the mid-19 th up to the end of the 20 th century and into the 21 st century. The closing of the large asylum in the... more
In this paper, we consider the changes to memorial practice for mental health service users, during the asylum period of the mid-19 th up to the end of the 20 th century and into the 21 st century. The closing of the large asylum in the UK has been largely welcomed by professionals and service-users alike, and yet, their closure has led to a decrease in continuous and consistent care for those with enduring mental health challenges. Furthermore, temporary and time-limited mental health services, largely dedicated to crisis management and risk reduction have failed to adequately account for, and help enable, memory practices outside the therapy room. Privatised memories are thus favoured over any collective memorial activity. Collective memories of difficult and traumatic life experiences, social and cultural barriers and forms of discrimination, which may be significant factors in the generation of mental health difficulties, are not given sufficient space among communities of service users. We argue that the communification of service user memories, especially in institutions containing large numbers of long stay patients, would benefit both staff and patients. The benefit would be in the development of awareness of how service users make sense of their past in relation to their present stay in hospital, how they might connect with others in similar positions and how they may connect with the world and others, upon future release. This seems to us central to a project of recovery and yet is rarely practiced in any mental health institution, despite being central to other forms of care provision, such as elderly and children's care services. We offer some suggestions on how collective and communification models of memory in mental health might assist in this project of recovery and create greater visibility between past, present and future imaginings; a project we believe will help, not hinder.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Social Psychology, Feminist Theory, Social Sciences, Narrative, History and Memory, and 10 moreMemory Studies, Social and Collective Memory, Cultural Memory, Narrative and Identity, Popular And Political Cultures Of Memory, Social Memory, Autobiographical Memory, Visual Research Methods, Social Remembering, and Narrative and Autobiography
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Social Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Media Studies, Feminist Theory, Child abuse and neglect, and 11 morePsychotherapy and Counseling, Qualitative Methods, Legal Anthropology, Gender and Sexuality, Culture, Memory Studies, Cultural Memory, Qualitative Research, Collective Memory, Clinical Forensic Psychology, and Social Remembering
Research Interests:
The sociocultural model of autobiographical memory focuses on the narrative or storied nature of autobiographical memories and the role of adult–child interactions in scaffolding these stories. Work in discursive psychology extends this... more
The sociocultural model of autobiographical memory focuses on the narrative or storied nature of autobiographical memories and the role of adult–child interactions in scaffolding these stories. Work in discursive psychology extends this interactional focus and demonstrates the action orientation of jointly constructed narratives. However, in this work, there is hitherto little differentiation made among types of autobiographical narratives. Memories of “difficult” or “painful” events, such as sexual violence, neglect, physical injury, and “traumatic” experiences, present particular challenges in terms of narrative organization, interaction, and agency. Speakers must demonstrate responsibility in how they recruit one another into such narratives. Where there is a power asymmetry, this can involve a collaborative “managed accessibility” for memories of particularly distressing details. This chapter provides a conceptual scheme for approaching “vital memories” of these sorts and discus...
Research Interests:
In this paper, we consider changes to memorial practices for mental health service users during the asylum period of the mid-nineteenth up to the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The closing of large asylums... more
In this paper, we consider changes to memorial practices for mental health service users during the asylum period of the mid-nineteenth up to the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The closing of large asylums in the UK has been largely welcomed by professionals and service-users alike, but their closure has led to a decrease in continuous and consistent care for those with enduring mental health challenges. Temporary and time-limited mental health services, largely dedicated to crisis management and risk reduction have failed to enable memory practices outside the therapy room. This is an unusual case of privatised memories being favoured over collective memorial activity. We argue that the collectivisation of service user memories, especially in institutions containing large numbers of long-stay patients, would benefit both staff and patients. The benefit would be in the development of awareness of how service users make sense of their past in relation...
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Sociology, Human Geography, Environmental Psychology, Mental Health, Space and Place, and 12 moreForensic psychiatry, Gilles Deleuze, Medicine, Temporality, Visual Research Methods, Assemblage, Assemblage Theory, Artefact Assemblage Studies (archaeology), Public health systems and services research, Health and Place, Institutional care, and Impermanence
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader “post asylum” landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and... more
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader “post asylum” landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and institutionally legitimated, due to concerns regarding risk. As a result, sexuality is rarely explored with service users and no official policies on sexual conduct and sexual safety have yet been developed, despite sexuality being linked to positive recovery outcomes. The aim of this study was to explore with service users how they experience and more specifically “feel” their sexuality during their time in secure care and in the community. A further aim was to understand how sexuality connected with their thoughts and feelings on recovery and relationships, and their perceived impact on mental health. We report on the findings from 29 service users participating in a qualitative-visual study, using drawing as a visual technique to provide an opportunity for expression of feeling. In this paper, the analytical focus is on how institutional practices can induce a “liminal hot-spot”, wherein an impasse between past crisis and future recovery is reached, taking theoretical direction from Stenner’s work on liminality and Fuch’s work on vitality. Specifically, we examine how service users experience liminality and the practices that emerge from such a state of living that can serve to objectify and suspend feelings of vitality. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for a recovery model and the development of policies on sexuality, sexual safety and relationality, within secure forensic settings.
Research Interests:
Contemporary reformulations of the nature of “the psychological” call out for different approaches to autobiographical memory. If epistemic and methodological differences are set aside, debate can be focused on four key themes—function,... more
Contemporary reformulations of the nature of “the psychological” call out for different approaches to autobiographical memory. If epistemic and methodological differences are set aside, debate can be focused on four key themes—function, accessibility, accuracy, and life story. What persons do with memory needs to be indexed to the interactional contexts where the past is invoked, where the accessibility of autobiographical memories is a collaborative accomplishment. While the accuracy of memory is nearly always at issue, the criterion and procedures through which it is established vary across practices, as do capacities to produce biographical coherency. An “expanded” or “modern” view of memory should seek to analyze brains, voices, objects, and settings together.
Research Interests:
Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the... more
Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional space. This article draws on qualitative material collected in a large forensic psychiatric unit in the UK, comprising 20 staff interviews and 20 photo production interviews with patients. We use John Law’s ‘modes of ordering’ to explore how the materials, relations and spaces are mobilised in everyday processes of living and working on the unit. We identify two ‘modes of ordering’: ‘keeping safe’, which we argue tends towards empty, stultified and static spaces; and ‘keep progressing’ which instead requires filling, enriching and ingraining spaces. We discuss ways in which tensions between these modes of ordering are resolved in the unit,...
Research Interests:
The dynamics of memory are broadly distributed across relationships, institutions, material affordances and, of course, discursive practices. The Chancellor's memory is an attempt to show how the subject matter parsed by cognitive... more
The dynamics of memory are broadly distributed across relationships, institutions, material affordances and, of course, discursive practices. The Chancellor's memory is an attempt to show how the subject matter parsed by cognitive psychology can be lifted wholesale into a discursive approach. Discursive Psychology has its roots in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, a discipline that was acutely aware of the vacuous nature of claims to systematicity, rigor, and most notoriously replication. Dave Middleton's early work shared a concern with the linguistic steering of children's activities, having been part of the group that refined the experimental demonstration of scaffolding in parent child interactions. These studies were critical to a move in developmental psychology of placing cognitive development in a sociocultural context. Edwards and Goodwin argue that lexical development in children is poorly grasped when it is treated in terms of gradual conceptual understan...
Research Interests:
The relationship between place and remembering has been a longstanding matter of phenomenological concern. The role of the ‘lived body’ in mediating acts of remembering in context is clearly crucial. In this paper we contribute to an... more
The relationship between place and remembering has been a longstanding matter of phenomenological concern. The role of the ‘lived body’ in mediating acts of remembering in context is clearly crucial. In this paper we contribute to an ‘expanded view of memory’ by describing how remembering difficult or problematic events ― ‘vital memories’ ― draws upon inter-subjective and inter-objective relations. We discuss two conceptual tools that provide an analytic framework ― the concept of ‘life space’ drawn from Kurt Lewin (1936) and the idea of the ‘setting specificity’ of remembering. From this perspective we can see that the ‘lived body’ does not constitute a singular unity but rather a ‘plurality’ of potential bodies that have ‘operative solidarity’ (cf. Simondon, 2009) with the material relations in which they are constituted. Drawing on the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, we argue that ‘body memories’ need to be analysed from within the embodied material-relational perspective whe...
Research Interests:
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in... more
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in an organizational acoustic environment. Based around a qualitative study of listening practices and ‘ear-work’ at a medium-secure forensic psychiatric hospital, using interview and photo-production methods, the article positions the organizing of the sensory as central to formal organization. Analysis of empirical material demonstrates how the refinement of key listening practices is critical to the ways in which staff and patients orient to the hospital setting. It also details how the design process for the unit has undermined the capacity to manage and control through sound, or ‘panauralism’, rendering it as a reversible and contested struggle to make sense of the acoustic environment, and describes the attempts by patients to create alternative ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The dichotomy between ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ in relation to memory is difficult to clearly sustain. The veridicality of memory is typically established by drawing on the local, normative procedures that operate in a given setting (e.g.... more
The dichotomy between ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ in relation to memory is difficult to clearly sustain. The veridicality of memory is typically established by drawing on the local, normative procedures that operate in a given setting (e.g. legal, clinical, social). Since all procedures are strictly relative, all memories are technically either ‘relatively falsified’ or ‘relatively as-yet-unfalsified’. False memory studies claim to be able explain the production of false memories, but do not offer criterion to effectively differentiate populations of so-called ‘true’ and ‘false’ victims. The narrative of the discovery of the ‘false memories’ themselves is inconsistent and demonstrates a significant level of imagination inflation and suggestibility to dominant narratives in post-war psychology. In attending to the setting specificity of memory, researchers may wish to consider how their work impacts on the experience–ecologies to which they contribute.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Brief Psychotherapy, Emotion, Human Geography, and 15 morePsychiatry, Mental Health, Space and Place, Community-Based Mental Health Services, Embodiment, Gilles Deleuze, Qualitative Research, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Medicine, United Kingdom, Affect, Health and Place, Elsevier, Psychotherapeutic Processes, and Interviews as topic
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Individuals with mental health problems are considered to be part of a group labeled 'vulnerable' in forensic psychology literature and the legal system more generally. In producing witness statements, there are numerous... more
Individuals with mental health problems are considered to be part of a group labeled 'vulnerable' in forensic psychology literature and the legal system more generally. In producing witness statements, there are numerous guidelines in the UK, designed to facilitate the production of reliable and valid accounts by those deemed to be vulnerable witnesses. And yet, it is not entirely clear how mental health impacts on reliability and validity within the judicial system, partly due to the diversity of those who present with mental health difficulties. In this paper, we set out to explore how legal professionals operating in the UK understand the impact of mental distress on the practical production of witness testimonies. Twenty legal professionals, including police officers, judges, magistrates and detectives were involved in a semi-structured interview to examine their knowledge and experience of working with mental health problems, and how they approached and worked with this...
Research Interests: Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Law, Mental Health, and 15 moreQualitative methodology, Expert testimony, Qualitative Methods, Forensic psychiatry, Qualitative Research Methods, Medicine, Clinical Forensic Psychology, Humans, Female, Male, Mental Disorders, Vulnerable Populations, Adult, Reproducibility of Results, and Psychological Stress
Very little is known about the sexual activities of psychiatric patients during their stay in hospital and beyond. In this article, we have explored how mental health professionals working within a forensic psychiatric unit construct the... more
Very little is known about the sexual activities of psychiatric patients during their stay in hospital and beyond. In this article, we have explored how mental health professionals working within a forensic psychiatric unit construct the issue of patient sexuality in order to ascertain the range of sexual possibilities open to patients. Drawing on interviews with twenty four participants - psychiatrists and clinical psychologists (clinical staff), we examined how participants made sense of patient sexuality and their clinical judgments in relation to them. Using a thematic analysis, we were able to identify a number of relevant themes emerging, including a) what the limits of acceptable sexual behaviour were judged to be, b) discrimination against transgender and same sex relationships, c) vulnerability among female patients and therapeutic efficacy, and d) an abject fear of patient pregnancy. Furthermore, a general concern throughout was the putative professional conflict between t...
Research Interests: Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Law, Psychiatry, Decision Making, and 15 moreGender and Sexuality, Forensic psychiatry, Forensic Medicine, Critical Prison Studies, Medicine, Prisons, Psychiatry and the law, Humans, Female, Male, Mental Disorders, Adult, Inpatients, Elsevier, and professional patient relations
A co-authored piece with Elena Bendien and Paula Reavey. Explores how elderly visitors interact with the Reminiscence Museum at Humanitas, Rotterdam.
Research Interests:
The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. Autobiographical memories of difficult and... more
The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. Autobiographical memories of difficult and distressing past episodes – or ‘vital memories’ – require extensive and ongoing management. We describe the issues that arise when vital memories are expressed across a range of specific interactional contexts. Seven themes – autobiography, agency, forgetting, ethics, affect, space and institutional practices – are discussed. Each theme draws out a particular facet of the relationship between the content and contexts of vital memories and demonstrates that while vital memories frame problematic experiences, they remain essential for those who express them.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader “post asylum” landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and... more
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader “post asylum” landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and institutionally legitimated, due to concerns regarding risk. As a result, sexuality is rarely explored with service users and no official policies on sexual conduct and sexual safety have yet been developed, despite sexuality being linked to positive recovery outcomes. The aim of this study was to explore with service users how they experience and more specifically “feel” their sexuality during their time in secure care and in the community. A further aim was to understand how sexuality connected with their thoughts and feelings on recovery and relationships, and their perceived impact on mental health. We report on the findings from 29 service users participating in a qualitative-visual study, using drawing as a visual technique to provide an opportunity for expression of feeling. In this paper, the analytical focus is on how institutional practices can induce a “liminal hot-spot”, wherein an impasse between past crisis and future recovery is reached, taking theoretical direction from Stenner’s work on liminality and Fuch’s work on vitality. Specifically, we examine how service users experience liminality and the practices that emerge from such a state of living that can serve to objectify and suspend feelings of vitality. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for a recovery model and the development of policies on sexuality, sexual safety and relationality, within secure forensic settings.
Research Interests:
Contemporary reformulations of the nature of “the psychological” call out for different approaches to autobiographical memory. If epistemic and methodological differences are set aside, debate can be focused on four key themes—function,... more
Contemporary reformulations of the nature of “the psychological” call out for different approaches to autobiographical memory. If epistemic and methodological differences are set aside, debate can be focused on four key themes—function, accessibility, accuracy, and life story. What persons do with memory needs to be indexed to the interactional contexts where the past is invoked, where the accessibility of autobiographical memories is a collaborative accomplishment. While the accuracy of memory is nearly always at issue, the criterion and procedures through which it is established vary across practices, as do capacities to produce biographical coherency. An “expanded” or “modern” view of memory should seek to analyze brains, voices, objects, and settings together.
Research Interests:
Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the... more
Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional space. This article draws on qualitative material collected in a large forensic psychiatric unit in the UK, comprising 20 staff interviews and 20 photo production interviews with patients. We use John Law’s ‘modes of ordering’ to explore how the materials, relations and spaces are mobilised in everyday processes of living and working on the unit. We identify two ‘modes of ordering’: ‘keeping safe’, which we argue tends towards empty, stultified and static spaces; and ‘keep progressing’ which instead requires filling, enriching and ingraining spaces. We discuss ways in which tensions between these modes of ordering are resolved in the unit,...
Research Interests:
The dynamics of memory are broadly distributed across relationships, institutions, material affordances and, of course, discursive practices. The Chancellor's memory is an attempt to show how the subject matter parsed by cognitive... more
The dynamics of memory are broadly distributed across relationships, institutions, material affordances and, of course, discursive practices. The Chancellor's memory is an attempt to show how the subject matter parsed by cognitive psychology can be lifted wholesale into a discursive approach. Discursive Psychology has its roots in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, a discipline that was acutely aware of the vacuous nature of claims to systematicity, rigor, and most notoriously replication. Dave Middleton's early work shared a concern with the linguistic steering of children's activities, having been part of the group that refined the experimental demonstration of scaffolding in parent child interactions. These studies were critical to a move in developmental psychology of placing cognitive development in a sociocultural context. Edwards and Goodwin argue that lexical development in children is poorly grasped when it is treated in terms of gradual conceptual understan...
Research Interests:
The relationship between place and remembering has been a longstanding matter of phenomenological concern. The role of the ‘lived body’ in mediating acts of remembering in context is clearly crucial. In this paper we contribute to an... more
The relationship between place and remembering has been a longstanding matter of phenomenological concern. The role of the ‘lived body’ in mediating acts of remembering in context is clearly crucial. In this paper we contribute to an ‘expanded view of memory’ by describing how remembering difficult or problematic events ― ‘vital memories’ ― draws upon inter-subjective and inter-objective relations. We discuss two conceptual tools that provide an analytic framework ― the concept of ‘life space’ drawn from Kurt Lewin (1936) and the idea of the ‘setting specificity’ of remembering. From this perspective we can see that the ‘lived body’ does not constitute a singular unity but rather a ‘plurality’ of potential bodies that have ‘operative solidarity’ (cf. Simondon, 2009) with the material relations in which they are constituted. Drawing on the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, we argue that ‘body memories’ need to be analysed from within the embodied material-relational perspective whe...
Research Interests:
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in... more
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in an organizational acoustic environment. Based around a qualitative study of listening practices and ‘ear-work’ at a medium-secure forensic psychiatric hospital, using interview and photo-production methods, the article positions the organizing of the sensory as central to formal organization. Analysis of empirical material demonstrates how the refinement of key listening practices is critical to the ways in which staff and patients orient to the hospital setting. It also details how the design process for the unit has undermined the capacity to manage and control through sound, or ‘panauralism’, rendering it as a reversible and contested struggle to make sense of the acoustic environment, and describes the attempts by patients to create alternative ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The dichotomy between ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ in relation to memory is difficult to clearly sustain. The veridicality of memory is typically established by drawing on the local, normative procedures that operate in a given setting (e.g.... more
The dichotomy between ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ in relation to memory is difficult to clearly sustain. The veridicality of memory is typically established by drawing on the local, normative procedures that operate in a given setting (e.g. legal, clinical, social). Since all procedures are strictly relative, all memories are technically either ‘relatively falsified’ or ‘relatively as-yet-unfalsified’. False memory studies claim to be able explain the production of false memories, but do not offer criterion to effectively differentiate populations of so-called ‘true’ and ‘false’ victims. The narrative of the discovery of the ‘false memories’ themselves is inconsistent and demonstrates a significant level of imagination inflation and suggestibility to dominant narratives in post-war psychology. In attending to the setting specificity of memory, researchers may wish to consider how their work impacts on the experience–ecologies to which they contribute.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Brief Psychotherapy, Emotion, Human Geography, and 15 morePsychiatry, Mental Health, Space and Place, Community-Based Mental Health Services, Embodiment, Gilles Deleuze, Qualitative Research, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Medicine, United Kingdom, Affect, Health and Place, Elsevier, Psychotherapeutic Processes, and Interviews as topic
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Individuals with mental health problems are considered to be part of a group labeled 'vulnerable' in forensic psychology literature and the legal system more generally. In producing witness statements, there are numerous... more
Individuals with mental health problems are considered to be part of a group labeled 'vulnerable' in forensic psychology literature and the legal system more generally. In producing witness statements, there are numerous guidelines in the UK, designed to facilitate the production of reliable and valid accounts by those deemed to be vulnerable witnesses. And yet, it is not entirely clear how mental health impacts on reliability and validity within the judicial system, partly due to the diversity of those who present with mental health difficulties. In this paper, we set out to explore how legal professionals operating in the UK understand the impact of mental distress on the practical production of witness testimonies. Twenty legal professionals, including police officers, judges, magistrates and detectives were involved in a semi-structured interview to examine their knowledge and experience of working with mental health problems, and how they approached and worked with this...
Research Interests: Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Law, Mental Health, and 15 moreQualitative methodology, Expert testimony, Qualitative Methods, Forensic psychiatry, Qualitative Research Methods, Medicine, Clinical Forensic Psychology, Humans, Female, Male, Mental Disorders, Vulnerable Populations, Adult, Reproducibility of Results, and Psychological Stress
Very little is known about the sexual activities of psychiatric patients during their stay in hospital and beyond. In this article, we have explored how mental health professionals working within a forensic psychiatric unit construct the... more
Very little is known about the sexual activities of psychiatric patients during their stay in hospital and beyond. In this article, we have explored how mental health professionals working within a forensic psychiatric unit construct the issue of patient sexuality in order to ascertain the range of sexual possibilities open to patients. Drawing on interviews with twenty four participants - psychiatrists and clinical psychologists (clinical staff), we examined how participants made sense of patient sexuality and their clinical judgments in relation to them. Using a thematic analysis, we were able to identify a number of relevant themes emerging, including a) what the limits of acceptable sexual behaviour were judged to be, b) discrimination against transgender and same sex relationships, c) vulnerability among female patients and therapeutic efficacy, and d) an abject fear of patient pregnancy. Furthermore, a general concern throughout was the putative professional conflict between t...
Research Interests: Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Law, Psychiatry, Decision Making, and 15 moreGender and Sexuality, Forensic psychiatry, Forensic Medicine, Critical Prison Studies, Medicine, Prisons, Psychiatry and the law, Humans, Female, Male, Mental Disorders, Adult, Inpatients, Elsevier, and professional patient relations
A co-authored piece with Elena Bendien and Paula Reavey. Explores how elderly visitors interact with the Reminiscence Museum at Humanitas, Rotterdam.
Research Interests:
The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. Autobiographical memories of difficult and... more
The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. Autobiographical memories of difficult and distressing past episodes – or ‘vital memories’ – require extensive and ongoing management. We describe the issues that arise when vital memories are expressed across a range of specific interactional contexts. Seven themes – autobiography, agency, forgetting, ethics, affect, space and institutional practices – are discussed. Each theme draws out a particular facet of the relationship between the content and contexts of vital memories and demonstrates that while vital memories frame problematic experiences, they remain essential for those who express them.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In this article, we argue that emergent interests in social interaction, wider context and culture with regards to memory have united formerly disparate approaches within the discipline of psychology, namely, that from the discursive and... more
In this article, we argue that emergent interests in social interaction, wider context and culture with regards to memory have united formerly disparate approaches within the discipline of psychology, namely, that from the discursive and experimental cognitive paradigms. Here, we develop the argument on the centrality of interaction and continuity and present an expanded approach that is best able to incorporate distressing events, which we call ‘Vital Memory’. We argue here that this perspective provides an analysis of continuity and interactional dynamics, while not losing sight of what is ethically at stake when individuals remember, especially where memories that are vital to a sense of self in the present are concerned. This perspective encourages a view that treats memory as emerging through the ongoing flow of experience, across time, space and narrative.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Forensic mental health inpatients in medium-secure settings have a limited capacity for sexual expression during their stay in hospital. This is due to a number of factors, including a lack of willingness on behalf of staff to engage with... more
Forensic mental health inpatients in medium-secure settings have a limited capacity for sexual expression during their stay in hospital. This is due to a number of factors, including a lack of willingness on behalf of staff to engage with sexual issues, as a result of safety fears and ambiguity regarding the ability of the patient to consent. Furthermore, UK forensic medium-secure units do not provide conjugal suites for patients to have sexual relations, with their spouse or other patients. To date, there is no empirical research on how forensic psychiatric patients (or service users) manage their sexuality, while in hospital and when released into the community. Here, we present an analysis of semi-structured interviews with patients at a UK medium forensic unit, in order to explore these issues further. More specifically, we examine how the public exclusion of sexuality from these units results in sexuality being experienced as sectioned off or amputated, such that a new form of ...
Research Interests: Sociology, Sexuality, Forensic psychiatry, Health, Humans, and 14 moreMajor Depressive Disorder, Female, Male, Young Adult, Organizational Policy, Great Britain, Middle Aged, Adult, Public health systems and services research, Psychotic Disorders, Inpatients, Criminals, Antipsychotic agents, and Interviews as topic
Research Interests: Clinical Psychology, Community Psychology, Social Psychology, Human Geography, Social Geography, and 15 morePerception, Mental Health, Heterotopia, Space and Place, Actor Network Theory, Visual methodology, Gilles Deleuze, Critical Social Psychology, Michel Foucault, Qualitative Research, Social Inclusion, Space, Humans, Social Psychiatry, and Patients
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader “post asylum” landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and... more
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader “post asylum” landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and institutionally legitimated, due to concerns regarding risk. As a result, sexuality is rarely explored with service users and no official policies on sexual conduct and sexual safety have yet been developed, despite sexuality being linked to positive recovery outcomes.
The aim of this study was to explore with service users how they experience and more specifically “feel” their sexuality during their time in secure care and in the community. A further aim was to understand how sexuality connected with their thoughts and feelings on recovery and relationships, and their perceived impact on mental health. We report on the findings from 29 service users participating in a qualitative-visual study, using drawing as a visual technique to provide an opportunity for expression of feeling.
In this paper, the analytical focus is on how institutional practices can induce a “liminal hot-spot”, wherein an impasse between past crisis and future recovery is reached, taking theoretical direction from Stenner’s work on liminality and Fuch’s work on vitality. Specifically, we examine how service users experience liminality and the practices that emerge from such a state of living that can serve to objectify and suspend feelings of vitality. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for a recovery model and the development of policies on sexuality, sexual safety and relationality, within secure forensic settings.
The aim of this study was to explore with service users how they experience and more specifically “feel” their sexuality during their time in secure care and in the community. A further aim was to understand how sexuality connected with their thoughts and feelings on recovery and relationships, and their perceived impact on mental health. We report on the findings from 29 service users participating in a qualitative-visual study, using drawing as a visual technique to provide an opportunity for expression of feeling.
In this paper, the analytical focus is on how institutional practices can induce a “liminal hot-spot”, wherein an impasse between past crisis and future recovery is reached, taking theoretical direction from Stenner’s work on liminality and Fuch’s work on vitality. Specifically, we examine how service users experience liminality and the practices that emerge from such a state of living that can serve to objectify and suspend feelings of vitality. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for a recovery model and the development of policies on sexuality, sexual safety and relationality, within secure forensic settings.
Research Interests:
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Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the... more
Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional space. This article draws on qualitative material collected in a large forensic psychiatric unit in the UK, comprising 20 staff interviews and 20 photo production interviews with patients. We use John Law’s ‘modes of ordering’ to explore how the materials, relations and spaces are mobilised in everyday processes of living and working on the unit. We identify two ‘modes of ordering’: ‘keeping safe’, which we argue tends towards empty, stultified and static spaces; and ‘keep progressing’ which instead requires filling, enriching and ingraining spaces. We discuss ways in which tensions between these modes of ordering are resolved in the unit,...
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The climate or atmosphere of a ward in secure psychiatric care is typically studied by examining the relationship between social and environmental factors. However the experiences of patients are irreducible to a set of discrete... more
The climate or atmosphere of a ward in secure psychiatric care is typically studied by examining the relationship between social and environmental factors. However the experiences of patients are irreducible to a set of discrete dimensions or factors. Drawing on recent work in affect theory and architectural studies, we argue for an approach to atmosphere that places it ‘in-between’ persons and space, as a ‘spatially extended quality of feeling’ of which patients are intimately aware. The article discusses empirical material drawn from a broader study of inpatient medium-secure forensic care in a large hospital in the South of England. We show how the process of becoming attuned to the fluctuations and shifts in the atmosphere of the ward is a critical aspect of everyday life for patients. Attunement cuts across existing notions of power and resistance in these settings. We also demonstrate how attachments to a range of objects, some created by patients, can either expand or punctua...
Research Interests:
Previous research on young people's satisfaction of inpatient services has often relied on the responses of carers and relevant practitioners. It is difficult to ascertain to what extent such reporting accurately represents the... more
Previous research on young people's satisfaction of inpatient services has often relied on the responses of carers and relevant practitioners. It is difficult to ascertain to what extent such reporting accurately represents the satisfaction levels of young people, with emerging research suggesting wide discrepancies. As part of a wider study evaluating the effectiveness of a Supported Discharge Service (SDS) operating within SLaM, this paper examines how young people's experience inpatient services, on a social and emotional level. Twenty young people, (ten SDS and ten TAU) participated in a semi-structured visual-interview study to examine their experiences of admission, ward-life and treatment. A thematic analysis was conducted on the data and specific themes relevant to satisfaction and engagement with inpatient services was examined in-depth. These include a) Behavioural surveillance as care surrogate and b) Managing the delicate emotional ecology of the ward: openness, triggering, sterility and relational engagements. Finally, we explore some of the implications of these inpatient experiences for supported discharge services.