Projects

CIRMH supports a number of research and engagement projects at Birkbeck involving academics, community partners and collaborations with other universities.

The Adolescent Girls Project Using video diaries, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and film, the project adopted an interdisciplinary approach to explore the everyday lives of adolescent girls. It piloted an innovative method for capturing and communicating what matters most to adolescents from their own perspective, and sharing these insights with broader audiences – including young people.

Art & Psychotherapy Though the question ‘what is art’ is rote, the utilisation of art as therapeutic endeavour, championed by therapeutic communities and supported by institutions, tugs at the boundaries of meaning of art via its maker and the maker’s ‘location’. This project brings together scholars from arts-based practice, art history, history of the human sciences, and psychosocial studies to reflect collectively on what is produced in art therapy.

CBT In Context Cognitive and behavioural therapies are the most widely-used talking treatments in the contemporary world, with significant political and economic backing within the UK health service, and a rising profile in Global Mental Health. This interdisciplinary UKRI project traces their origins and development in political and social context, and investigates how service-users and clients experience interventions.

Legacies of Aversion ‘Therapy’ This project reflects on the history of aversion ‘therapy’ practices and LGBTQ+ communities in Britain; the legacies of these practices; and the contemporary reparative work of organisations and institutions in relation to past harms.

Petty Tyranny and Soulless Discipline is a book project that places patients at its centre to explore their daily lives in English public mental health hospitals after the First World War. These narratives, drawn from a range of primary sources, are contextualised in an historical analysis of how and why a mixture of stagnating and changing knowledge, attitudes and ideals affected their experiences.

Psychiatry, Confinement, & Racialisation This project starts from the premise that psychiatry’s role in encampment, racialised differentiation and colonial ‘rehabilitation’ is integral to understanding colonial confinement and contemporary psy practice. It brings together scholars working on different angles of this problem – historical, anthropological, journalistic, activist and clinical – to connect these elements of discussion and generate new understanding and seeds of collaboration for what insights archival and research scholarship can offer to critical understanding of past psychiatry and their reverberations in the present day.

Psychotechne A two-person exhibition of works by Sasha Bergstrom-Katz and Tomas Percival at The Peltz Gallery, linked with a public event series and journal special issue, is an artistic research-based project examining how individuals are assessed through tests, forms, and databases that utilise psychometric technologies.

Recovery Histories This is the first social, cultural and medical history into recovery from Child Sexual Abuse in the second half of twentieth century Britain and Ireland. Via a mixed methods approach, it will offer a rare insight into the experiences of survivors and front line practitioners, who are commonly left out of the historical record. It brings the two groups together to learn from past experiences and influence present-day practice and policy.