Alex completed her BSc in Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, before pursuing a Masters in Science Communication at Imperial College London. Throughout her Master's, Alex gained editorial and journalistic experience while working at the University's Press Office, before going on to work as a reporter for Science Magazine, and then at CERN Courier, an international high-energy physics magazine based in Geneva.

For her Master's thesis, Alex developed on a project that explored the complex intersections of language, culture and power dynamics within psychiatry. Her work evaluated the dangers of viewing mental health solely through one framework and failing to account for cultural nuances of psychiatric illness, risking the perpetuation of systemic inequalities in diagnosis and treatment.

For her PhD in Global Health and Social Medicine, Alex is expanding the scope of this research to investigate how psychiatrists and interpreters listen across languages in multi-lingual psychiatric encounters, with the aim of identifying how “losses in translation” occur. These seemingly small moments of miscommunication are known to lead to detrimental consequences for the service user and to stark mental health disparities between linguistic groups in the UK.

Research

"Psychiatric Translation as Care: Navigating the multi-lingual psychiatric encounter in the UK"

In the UK, professional trainings rarely prepare psychiatrist and medical interpreters for the challenges that arise when mental health care crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries. This PhD project investigates how psychiatrists, interpreters, and service users listen across languages in the multi-lingual psychiatric encounter. The project inquires how meaning and authority are negotiated within this triadic relationship, and how or why the well-known “losses in translation” occur, leading to detrimental effects for the service user.

The aim is to provide an empirical understanding of the challenges of multi-lingual psychiatric encounters and co-develop solutions. The study uses qualitative and participatory methods to understand the perspectives and unmet needs of all stakeholders, focusing particularly on the role of the interpreter. The research questions and outputs will be co-produced with two stakeholder organisations: the medical interpretation service, Herts Interpreting and Translation Service and the Royal College of Psychiatry.

By supporting the linguistic awareness, collaborative skills, and cultural competencies of these two professions, the research aims to improve the care experiences and outcomes for service users from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds in the UK.

PhD supervision

• Principal supervisor: Dr Dörte Bemme
• Secondary supervisor: Dr Cristian Montenegro

Further details

See Alexandra's research profile