Research Project Manager, School of History, Queen Mary University of London
I gained a PhD in the History of Medicine PhD from UCL in 2013. My thesis focused on self-inflicted injury in late nineteenth-century British asylum psychiatry. My first book, 'Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-harm' (Reaktion, 2017) explores the wider history of self-harm, from the ancient world to the present day. The book combines historical research, critical psychology and cultural studies with reflections on my own lived experience of self-harm. In particular, I emphasise that we can't understand the present without reflecting on our past, and that the history of understanding self-harm as a behaviour can't be understood outside wider social and cultural issues.
My background is in museums and public engagement. I am part-time project manager (public engagement) on the 'Living with Feeling' project at Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, and I also run the events and exhibitions programme at the Royal College of Nursing. I have previously worked at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Benjamin Franklin House, the Old Operating Theatre Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons Museums. I have a strong interest in mental health advocacy and peer support, and the value of history, literature and the arts in formal and informal mental health care.
The Victorians are to blame for assumptions that self-harm is just attention-seeking
Mar 06, 2017 12:57 pm UTC| Insights & Views Health
As I know from bitter experience, self-harm is often linked to a desire to seek attention. Whats the point in referring you? a GP once said to me, with obvious irritation, when I asked him for referral to a free, charity...
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