International Health Humanities Network Membership

Historian of health in 20th century Britain and Ireland, particularly relating to mental health, law, sexuality and gender

I am senior lecturer in eighteenth and ninetheenth-century literature at Northumbria University. My research is primarily focused upon autobiographical prose, poetry, letters, pamphlets, and diaries, written by those who identify themselves as having experienced what we would now call depression; specifically in the ways people describe the experience in the absence of an established medical model / vocabulary.  I am also interested in the ways the that lifestories are constructed, and the competing claims made by autobiography, biography, biopics, and fictionalised versions of the 'true' story of a subject that has attained the status of celebrity, which is further complicated when the mental faculties of the subject are called into question.

i am co-author of 'Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century; Before Depression' (Palgrave, 2011), and General Editore and Editore of 'Depression and Melancholy 1660-1800', 4 Volumes (Pickering and Chatto, 2012). I am currently co-director of a three year research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled 'Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture c. 1660-1832'. An additional strand to my above research being developed in line with this project is the relationship between celebrity endorsement and the visibility of illness, and the impact that this relationship has upon debates about stigma and promotion.

Senior lecturer in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature at Northumbria University.  My area of research interest is in pre-medical, pre-pharmaceutical (i.e eighteenth century) autobiographical accounts of the experience of mental dis-ease.  I am also currently developing a strand of interest in the fashionability of illness, namely the relationship between celebrity endorsement and illness, and the impact of this endorsement upon debates about stigma.

Mark Wheeler (phototherapy@talktalk.net & mark.wheeler@nottshc.nhs.uk), lives in England where he is Principal Registered Art Psychotherapist working in the Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust Child & Adolescent mental Health Service NHS Clinic and a clinical supervisor in private practice. In his clinical work in Family Therapy and individual psychotherapy, Mark engages families and individuals in conversations, both about and with, their family photographs, be they prints, mobile phone images, or a sketch to substitute for a photograph that does not. A variety of emotional and neurodevelopmental issues are addressed by the service, including bereavement, eating disorders, early onset psychosis, attachment, depression, self-harm and autistic spectrum disorders as appropriate. Mark also teaches PhotoTherapy techniques to Bereavement Counsellors, Art Therapy students and Mental Health professionals.
Mark came to Art Psychotherapy via PhotoTherapy and his practice as a photographer, being interested in the psychological dimensions of making and viewing photographs in various contexts. Mark is fascinated by the unique photographic syntax and the capacity of photographs to short-circuit many of our mental visual filters, which can be read about on the bibliography page of www.phototherapy.org.uk. After meeting Jo Spence in 1984, Mark went on to use therapeutic photography with adolescents at a therapeutic community and subsequently became the first British photography graduate to undertake postgraduate Art Therapy training. Mark’s qualifying dissertation (1992) was Phototherapy: The Use of Photographs in Art Therapy (also at www.phototherapy.org.uk), for which he interviewed Judy Weiser and plundered her library.
Mark’s publications include a co-authored book chapter Male Therapist Countertransference and the Importance of Family Context (in Murphy, J, 2001 Lost For Words: Art Therapy With Young Survivors Of Sexual Abuse). Mark has a chapter in http://ecarte.info/ecarte_publication.htm (pp136-146) and a chapter in the forthcoming book Phototherapy in a Digital Age (Loewenthal 2012). He has appeared on BBC radio and been interviewed and quoted by magazines including Psychologies. Mark continues to make and exhibit photographs and received the Licentiateship (1990) and Associateship (2002) awards from the Royal Photographic Society (http://www.rps.org/).
In 2004 Mark was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society for his work examining the psychological aesthetics of making and viewing photographs and enlarged on these ideas as an ivited plenary speaker at the PhotoTherapy Conference, Turku, Finland 2008. Mark presents workshops on using photographs in therapy, including bereavement counselling, as well as sharing some of his experience working systemically with photographs and may be contacted via the website www.phototherapy.org.uk.

Mark Wheeler is Principal Art Psychotherapist working in a Child & Family Therapy NHS Clinic. In clinical work Mark engages families and individuals in conversations, both about and with family photographs, whether prints, mobile phone images, or a sketch to substitute for a photograph that does not already exist. A variety of emotional and neurodevelopmental issues are addressed by the service, including bereavement, eating disorders, early onset psychosis, attachment, depression, self-harm and autistic spectrum disorders as appropriate. Mark also teaches PhotoTherapy techniques to Counsellors, Art Therapists students, Mental Health professionals, Social Workers, teachers and other professions.

Mark came to PhotoTherapy via his practice as a photographer, becoming interested in the psychological dimensions of making and viewing photographs in various contexts. Mark remains fascinated by the unique photographic syntax and the capacity of photographs to short-circuit many of our mental visual filters, culminating in our unique relationships with photographs among all visual images. After meeting Jo Spence in 1984, Mark went on to use therapeutic photography with adolescents at a therapeutic community and subsequently became the first British photography graduate to undertake postgraduate Art Therapy training. Mark’s qualifying dissertation (1992) was Phototherapy: The Use Of Photographs In Art Therapy, for which he interviewed Judy Weiser and plundered her library.

Mark’s practice embraces encounters with the individual’s unconscious processes in psychodynamic or psychoanalytic models and whole families in systemic and narrative models. Mark’s publications include book chapters, peer reviewed articles and other articles.Mark has appeared on BBC radio and been interviewed and quoted by magazines. Mark has presented at various international conferences and universities. Mark continues to make and exhibit photographs and mixed media images.

In 2004 Mark was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society for his work examining the psychological aesthetics of making and viewing photographs and was invited plenary at the 1st European PhotoTherapy Conference, Turku, Finland 2008 as well as sharing some of his experience working systemically with photographs.

i am finishing my undergraduate degree, majoring in Health and Human Physiology, and pursuing a Global Health Studies minor. Since the summer of my freshman year, I have participated in research at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics in the Department of Internal Medicine under principal investigator Dr. Terry Wahls and mentor Dr. Warren G Darling. The study investigates the effect of a multimodal intervention (FES, modified Paleolithic diet, exercise) on the quality of life and gait of primary and secondary progressive multiple sclerosis patients. 

I am currently working on the aforementioned study, an FES Bike Study, and a project in Palliative Care. 

I hope to be investigating health experience in the United Kingdom before returning to the United States to attend medical school. 

Curator, Public Programmes, Nottingham Contemporary

I am interested in the history of medical discourse, particularly of the Early Modern period. As a corpus linguist, I use collections of digitised texts to explore language use and change. In the near future, I intend to develop a corpus of Early Modern German medical writing, which will complement extant tools available for English. This will facilitate more quantitative approaches to the study of pan-European medical traditions during the Early Modern period.

I'm currently studying for an MA in Applied English, likely to specialise in Creative Writing. I have an interest in the Health Humanities, and the touchpoints between health, wellbeing, and cultural reference points such as literature. I completed my undergraduate degree with a double major in English and Psychology in 2001 from the University of Cape Town