Han Dee
Han Dee is a writer and PhD candidate in creative writing/history at Queen Mary University (QMUL) funded by LAHP & supervised by Nisha Ramayya and Barbara Taylor. Their project is a non-fiction narrative centred on a near relative’s experiences of detention in England’s high-security psychiatric institutions 1972-2002: Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth; and reflecting on their own encounters with madness and mental health services. They bring a psycho-social lens to their work combining institutional analysis and abolitionist perspectives to consider societal responses to those deemed ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ and to imagine and construct alternatives. Han is a Teaching Associate at QMUL currently teaching on the MsC in psychological therapies. They are a member of TIAN—Transversal Institutional Analysis Network—a network of researchers, practitioners and organisers who study, invent, and reshape institutions and a committee member of Subtexts (@subtexts_sed_qmul), an emerging community & programme dedicated to nurturing a generative space for queer, trans & other marginalised writers.
Rachel Wilson
Rachel Wilson is a practice-based researcher working in accommodation services for people with high support mental health needs. She is currently conducting her doctoral studies and is an Associate Lecturer in BA Curating in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. Rachel’s work is situated at the intersection of radical forms of psychotherapy, aesthetics, filmmaking and the histories of institutional analysis. She is the co-author with Dr Anthony Faramelli of ‘Spaces of Refuge: The Clinical Practice of Félix Guattari and Institutional Psychotherapy’. Rachel is also a member of TIAN—Transversal Institutional Analysis Network—a network of researchers, practitioners and organisers who study, invent, and reshape institutions, and whose work draws upon the histories of Institutional Analysis (IA) that emerged in France, Italy, North Africa, and South America during the postwar era.
Bianca Griffani
Bianca Griffani is an anthropologist and a doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths college, University of London. Her PhD project focuses on the role of kinship in structuring struggles around social reproduction in contemporary Italy. She conducted her fieldwork in Terni, a steel-town in the Italian ‘rust belt’, where she was a co-organiser of Terni Solidale, an autonomous mutual-aid food pantry. She is also one of the founders of the local branch of ASIA USB, a militant tenants’ union. Currently, she teaches undergraduate classes on anthropological theory and critical research methods at UCL and Goldsmiths.
Bianca’s broad research interest is in the infrastructuring labour that working-class people perform to create and maintain collective systems of social reproduction that work for them and their communities, often by repurposing institutions in decline. In this labour, she finds the form of a future politics of the common. She has written about pandemic direct-solidarity action networks, football cultures as communities of radical care, and on the criminalisation of autonomous modes of provisioning in housing and sustainable food production.
Christian Tonner
Christian Tonner is an artist, organizer, and practice based researcher currently pursuing his doctoral studies at Goldsmiths University, London and is also a GTT lecturer in the department of Visual Cultures there. His research focuses on understanding labour as a perceptive mode and structuring system, and its refusal as artistic practice. Christian has participated and exhibited internationally in numerous institutions and galleries. He was the co-founder and director of the non-profit arts association “Studio 2o46 e.V.” in Berlin and has in recent years organized the lecture and conversation series “tiodtsuj”, which brings together practitioners and artist from different backgrounds and experiences into art adjacent environments in the U.K. and abroad.
Christian is also a member of TIAN (Transversal Institutional Analysis Network), which draws upon the histories and contemporary application of Institutional Analysis.
Cassandra Geisel
Is a Canadian psychotherapist living in London who also undertakes community mental health and suicide prevention work, alliance working, co-production and advocacy for informed consent around mental health. She is critical. She is curious. She is passionate about starting mindful conversations around mortality and grief and the founder of @lightindeath.
Slowslowzo
Slowslowzo as a zines creator critiques the lack of actual care in the Mad System, in Project Risk and the Mad System. In response to being deemed ‘hysterical’ by a Mad Professional, the mad zine, Don’t Swallow the Hysteriazine! was written. Subsequent zines deal with the locked in environment, Can you Open the Doors to Freedom without the Keys? and A Shock to the System. Sort Yourself Out offers agency and alternatives to survivors.
Slowslowzo is a survivor of the Mad System / carer / poet / artist and zinester. Slowslowzo has written for Asylum magazine, and has recently produced The Contortionist exhibition @museumofchelmsford.
Hannah Lawless
Hannah Lawless is a psychodynamic psychotherapist whose work spans multiple intersecting determinants of mental health, including domestic abuse, homelessness, and substance misuse. She is drawn to organisational and societal currents, particularly the shifting survivor-aggressor positions inhabited by both practitioners and service users within mental health systems, and the ways these dynamics influence service design and frontline clinical practice.
Lizzie Homersham
Lizzie Homersham is a writer and editor. Her art criticism has been published in Artforum (2018–2022), Art Monthly, Art Papers, Art in America, e-flux criticism, Another Gaze and The Wire. Her poetry appears in Ludd Gang 8 and 24, Interjection Calendar and Lugubriations. She was an editor at the arts press Book Works from 2015–2023 and currently works freelance. She completed the Philadelphia Association’s Introductory Course in philosophy and psychotherapy in 2025 and eventually hopes to write about her own experiences of psychosis and living with a bipolar diagnosis.
Emily Green
Having worked, in a pretty much constant state of disbelief and horror, as a healthcare assistant on an acute mental health inpatient ward, Emily is plagued by the question of how meaningful change can be made to the mental health system, what a system that generates and supports kindness and love would look like, and how we get there. She is curious about why there are no (?) staff activist groups and whether some kind of truth and reconciliation process is needed. She is doing an anthropology PhD at SOAS & LSHTM about the culture of unkindness in inpatient care and its relationship to the place of feeling/emotion in the system. She’s especially interested in how shame flows throughout the system. She organises a group for staff to share feelings, experiences and ways they resist the system, to counter the isolation experienced by many staff. (Please join!) She’d like to create a musical to depict some of the ridiculous aspects of the mental health system. (Please help!)
Mental Health & Social Justice Network 