The Department is home to a substantial group of researchers working within the philosophy of mental health. Their research encompasses topics including depression, delusion, hallucination, trauma, and grief.
Much of our work in the field is integrated with our expertise in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. By drawing on the insights of phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also pursuing pioneering phenomenological research of our own, departmental research illuminates various forms of experience that are distressing, and challenging to understand and describe. For example, Professor Matthew Ratcliffe and Dr Louise Richardson recently completed a major AHRC-funded project on what it is to experience grief, in all its diversity and complexity. The project included consideration of whether and when grief is pathological, as well as how grieving processes were disrupted by social restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Project outputs include Professor Ratcliffe’s open access book Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience.
Our pluralist research to mental health research also draws upon themes in analytic philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and metaphysics. For example, Professor Paul Noordhof was recently Co-investigator on an AHRC-funded project exploring the nature of delusions.
All of the Department’s mental health research is shaped by the commitment to make a difference practically—not just to theorize but to help people. This is exemplified by ongoing work with the Complex Trauma Institute, involving Professor Tom Stoneham and Dr Robert Davies, and also by an extensive programme of public engagement and charity-collaboration undertaken by staff working on the grief project.
