The Salon Presents: Trust and Mental Health

This month The Salon is centred on the theme of 'representations' and mental health.

We are delighted to welcome three provocateurs to get discussions started:

Jo Winning is Professor of Modern Literature & Critical Theory (Birkbeck, University of London). Jo works at the intersection of critical theory and clinical practice, exploring the ways in which insights and understandings around the body, illness, medicine and care, intersect with the complex, everyday realities of medicine in practice, education and training. She is Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities, Vice-President of the Association for Medical Humanities, and runs the only Masters programme in Applied Medical Humanities for clinicians and healthcare practitioners in the UK. She also leads the Birkbeck-St George’s Medical School partnership, in which humanities and medical undergraduates come together to learn. For over a decade, Jo has served as the lay academic expert on the Exams Sub-Committee of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Trust, we might say, is core to clinical practice, enshrined in regulatory systems such as the General Medical Council’s ‘entrustable competencies framework’, but trust has also been seen as a ‘neglected concept’ in Mental Health Services (Brown et al, 2009). Jo will explore how the humanities disciplines might help us hold the uncertainty of this crucial concept in mental health care.

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Gilles de Wildt leads the BMedSc Intercalation "Global Health" at the University of Birmingham. While foregoing an offer of psychiatry training after graduating as a doctor, he maintained his interest in mental health care when working in low resource settings in Southern Africa. Currently Associate Professor in Global Health and a GP, he is a governor of the Birmingham Women's and Children's Hospitals Trust with a candidate statement on improving mental health care for children and adolescents: The Trust also covers "Forward Thinking Birmingham" providing mental health care for 0-25 year olds. His first involvement with humanities was as a medical student - Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn. During his "NHS study leave" on "What does commercialisation do to trust in health care"? Onora O'Neil - and her Reith Lectures on Trust - became his favourite.

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Dr Sabena Jameel-Choudhury is an Associate Clinical Professor (Medical Professionalism) at the University of Birmingham Medical School (since 2020) and Inner City GP (since 2001). Sabena stresses in her lectures to medical students that professionalism is a trust generating promise. She has completed a PhD which looked at Phronesis (Practical Wisdom) as applied to Medicine. One of the key aspirations of a Phronesis approach to Medicine is Eudaimonia (Flourishing). Self- awareness, self-understanding and reflective practice are key feature in the wisdom exemplars that were studied. Sabena is a former Associate Dean (GP Education) for Health Education England (2013-2019).