International Health Humanities Network Membership

Biographical notes

An uneventful boy-hood and some Academic achievements saw me through tertiary education, which I completed in 1972. The occurrence of diagnosable symptoms appeared in what came to be my final year, but my course work merited the award of a BA Honours in Combined Humanities (aegrotat). I was 21 years old.

The slur cast by the nature of my diagnosis ensured that there were no opportunities to sit for any professional qualifications, so my vocation of Librarian remained on hold to this day. Five years passed without Library employment in any capacity, five years punctuated with a break-down, four months' hospitalisation and continuing treatment for schizophrenia, until Employment resettlement pointed me in the direction of a Library Supplier sweat-shop in Nottingham, where I remained full-time for fifteen years. At no stage did the financial rewards for this engagement creep up above my entitlements as a disabled person! I have never considered myself to be a drudge, so after being harassed and pushed about by 'thatcherite insurgents' in the 1990s, I agreed with the firm's doctor that I had had a 'run for my money' and it was time to abandon ship.

My Liberation was palpable and it is something I can never regret. Creativity had returned after a dormancy of some 21 years. I returned to writing and belatedly, to an interest I had shared with my Father in my teen-age years, Photography. Progressive thinking from Nottingham Healthcare has ensured my survival and provided occupational fulfilment via continuing care arrangements which have sustained me thus far. For many, schizophrenia is a life-sentence but the redeeming quality of any predicament is that some good can come out of it . I am indebted to the many well-wishers and the encouragement I have received from employees of the Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust, firstly for convincing me I have a present and a future and for now, for investing in that future.

I am a psychosociologist, with a business school degree in Humand Resource Management, a master in health economics and management, and a PhD in science and engineering of at-risk activities. My core research topic is burnout (in Alzheimer special care unit caregivers), but I am currently searching on various entities of fatigue, trying to develop "fatigue studies" as an integrative scientific field, inspired from Health Humanities. One of my favorite anthropological aterial is fiction literature, i particular from 19th Century in France and Germany.

An interest in arts and its role for mental wellbeing led to my research and professional development in the arts therapies. Before that, I trained in psychology and psychotherapy and worked in clinical roles in mental health settings. In my PhD project I explored the value of arts therapies for the treatment of adult depression. My current research interests and collaborations concern the general wellbeing, physical activity of older adults and arts-based interventions for depression.