Meanings of Recovery – Exploring the Long Shadow of Illness
A symposium on ‘The Meanings of Recovery’ was recently held at the University of Surrey. Speakers from a range of disciplines and professional backgrounds came together to discuss the ways that recovery has been conceptualised by different groups across various...
More…
You deserve a better life – Louis Theroux’s ‘Drinking to Oblivion’
This week I watched Louis Theroux’s BBC documentary on severe alcoholism. The programme followed patients of King’s College Hospital as they were admitted to A&E or to detox programmes, and spoke to specialists trying to deal with the many health...
More…
Howling together alone: Scandi-noir
The Flogsta Roar is a Scandi-noir miniature: a snapshot of existential anxiety in a snow-scattered landscape; loneliness and solidarity in an ordered society, treated with subtlety and wit and all in 18 minutes. Every night, at 10pm, the windows of...
More…
Tales of Everyday Drinking: Risk, Alcohol and Government Advice
“My name is …and I’m an alcoholic” – Wednesday, 13 January – 10pm on Channel 5 We have a complicated relationship with alcohol. Many of us are as likely to drink to drown our sorrows as we are to celebrate our successes....
More…
Chemsex
Made for VICE by directors William Fairman and Max Gogarty, Chemsex is an eighty-minute documentary film about drug-fuelled gay sex parties, the men involved, and the risks they take with their health. While the stories and images of injecting drug...
More…
Suffragette: On 100 years of votes for women
On the week the Bond film Spectre was released, as I entered the cinema through a 007 themed red carpet for the only screening of Suffragette that day, I was struck by the juxtaposition with Britain’s most popular misogynist. I...
More…
Cracked
How does it feel to have a young person in your care experience psychosis for the first time? An impressionistic answer to this question played out over sixty minutes in a studio theatre in Easterhouse, Glasgow: distress, frustration, repetition, annoyance,...
More…
‘Humans’, Healthcare Cyborgs and the Quantified Self
Many people have been intrigued by a TV advert for Persona Synthetics inviting them to experience ‘the new generation synthetic human’. This was actually a clever marketing ploy for Channel 4/AMC series Humans. The programme deals with themes that are familiar...
More…
Unequal Health: The scandal of our times by Danny Dorling, 2013, Policy Press
Is the UK becoming more like the US, when it ought to be following the example of its Scandinavian neighbours instead? With inequalities in mortality widening dramatically in the UK and the US, this is one of the arguments made...
More…
Waiting for the Xenografts…
David Hamilton 2012 A History of Organ Transplantation. Ancient Legends to Modern Practice. University of Pittsburgh Press. Transplant surgery holds a certain fascination, both for its potential to restore a broken human body and for the prospect of Frankenstein-horrors that...
More…
The high cost of living: a materially mediated encounter
My cost of living just went up. In a small supermarket in Lower Saxony, I bought a pint of milk with a 50 euro note and got change as if I’d paid with 10 euros. I noticed straight away, but...
More…
Much ado about nothing?
Shakespeare. Staging the World British Museum exhibition: 19 July to 25 November 2012 This exhibition seeks to create a dialogue between the imaginary worlds of Shakespeare’s plays and objects from the actual world that he and his contemporary audiences inhabited....
More…
