Current Projects

  • The investigation of delusions poses methodological challenges that stretch and push narrow disciplinary boundaries. Depending on the disciplinary focus, most research has hitherto focused on individual features of delusional phenomena, often failing to attend to their complexity.

    We think that, If we are to make genuine progress in understanding and treating delusions, it’s crucial that we embrace their inherently complex, dynamical, and situated nature. Direct engagement with lived expertise at all stages of the research project is essential to this goal.

    Thanks to the generous support of the Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology Project, we are working together to generate new lines of interdisciplinary enquiry for future research.

    In February 2024, we will host an interdisciplinary expansion sandpit workshop at the Psychiatric Hospital, University of Zurich, in collaboration with the newly founded competence centre ‘Language & Medicine’ Zurich.

  • This research is part of a doctoral program of study at the University of Birmingham and University of Melbourne, funded by a Priestley PhD scholarship and led by Dr. Ritunnano. Co-investigators: Prof. Matthew Broome, Prof. Barnaby Nelson, Prof. Jeannette Littlemore, Dr. Clara Humpston. The MELBA study design and protocol were developed in collaboration with the Institute for Mental Health Youth Advisory Group.

    The purpose of this research is to bridge the gap between clinical, narrative and lived experience dimensions of delusion using an interdisciplinary, participatory and mixed-methods approach.

    The results will help develop a more robust and pluralistic psychological explanation of delusions, which takes account of alternative ways of conceptualising delusions from the perspective of those with lived experience.

    Based on what we learn from this and related studies, we hope to develop training material for clinicians that supports and empowers patients throughout their recovery journey while also addressing stigmatisation in mental healthcare.

Team - Delusions at the Intersection

  • After an MD in experimental attachment theory, Anke joined the Psychiatric Hospital, University of Zurich for clinical training in psychiatry and psychotherapy and a Postdoc position in an interdisciplinary project on the conceptual history of ‘schizophrenia’. In 2020, she started her own research group Humanities in Mental Health at the Psychiatric Hospital, University of Zurich, where she is also involved in implementing participatory research.

    Connect with Anke on ResearchGate

  • Rosa Ritunnano is Consultant Psychiatrist in a specialist Early Intervention in Psychosis Service in the UK, and a joint doctoral researcher at the Universities of Birmingham and Melbourne. Her research explores the experience and meaning of delusions in psychosis from multiple perspectives, focusing on the applications of phenomenology across psychiatry, psychology, philosophy and linguistics.

    You know me already :)

  • Jeannette Littlemore is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the role played by figurative language in the sharing of emotional experiences. She also explores the role played by metaphor and metonymy in language learning in cross-cultural communication and language learning.

    Check out: Littlemore, J. (2019). Metaphors in the Mind: Sources of Variation in Embodied Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.