International Health Humanities Network Membership

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.