The double-edged sword : trauma, mental health, and sexual violence testimony in England and Wales

This thesis critically examines how the interaction of feminist, legal, and psychiatric discourses shape the experiences, and testimonies, of people who have experienced sexual violence and identify with psychiatric diagnoses in England and Wales. This is an interdisciplinary mixed-methods qualitative project analysing case law (n=11), policies (n=5), and qualitative interviews (n=9) with people who have experienced sexual violence and identify with psychiatric diagnoses. In bringing these materials together, I reveal the ways in which societal stereotypes and norms concerning the relationship between sexual violence and mental health come to bear on sexual violence testimony. The injustice of the law’s treatment of sexual violence and mental health here extends beyond the courtroom. This socio-legal project contends that the success of legislative reform concerning sexual violence and mental health must be understood in dialogue with both societal norms and stereotypes, and the experiences of people who have experienced sexual violence themselves. In a critical review of secondary feminist scholarship, I demonstrate how people who have experienced sexual violence are represented as “not sick” (hysterical), but “traumatised”. Norms and stereotypes then come to bear on the adjudication of cases, and the relationship between sexual violence and mental health is constructed as “legitimate trauma” or “abnormal” psychology. Interview participants discussed how identification with psychiatric diagnoses complicates the narrative demands of sexual violence testimony, by introducing new ways to diminish credibility that were mobilised along structural inequalities, producing “testimonial injustice”. Participants had to find ways to articulate sexual violence to both emphasise that they were “not sick”, but still “sick enough” for their experiences to be legitimate, revealing the “double-edged sword” of the medicalisation of sexual violence (McKenzie-Mohr & Lafrance, 2011). This thesis provides insight into how engaging with lived experiences of mental (dis)abilities can deepen, and support a more expansive, feminist anti-sexual violence politics

International genome-wide meta-analysis identifies new primary biliary cirrhosis risk loci and targetable pathogenic pathways.

Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) is a classical autoimmune liver disease for which effective immunomodulatory therapy is lacking. Here we perform meta-analyses of discovery data sets from genome-wide association studies of European subjects (n=2,764 cases and 10,475 controls) followed by validation genotyping in an independent cohort (n=3,716 cases and 4,261 controls). We discover and validate six previously unknown risk loci for PBC (Pcombined<5 × 10(-8)) and used pathway analysis to identify JAK-STAT/IL12/IL27 signalling and cytokine-cytokine pathways, for which relevant therapies exist

Stop the planet of the apes, I want to get off

Great Apes, originally a novel by Will Self, directly challenges our conception of what it is to be a human, what it is to be an ape, and what it is to be mentally ill. The play at the Arcola Theatre, London, follows Simon Dykes (Bryan Dick), a Turner Prize-winning artist, as he plunges into a drug-addled night out with his girlfriend, and awakes in a dystopian nightmare: not only is the woman he wakes up to a chimpanzee, but so is everyone around him. He is promptly admitted to a psychiatric hospital to treat his delusion of being human

Finding peace

Soldier On arrives at London's West End after a sell-out national tour in commemoration of 100 years since the end of the First World War. Jonathan Lewis's latest creation is the product of 5 years' workshopping with veterans and their families, a process now dramatised in the resulting play. Plucky director Harry (David Solomon) is accompanied by Lewis himself (as Len) in his pursuit of developing and performing a play with people affected by the military. Many of the performers are ex-servicemen and women, part of a collaboration with the Soldiers' Arts Academy