Rosanna Hildersley is an ESRC LISS DTP funded PhD student in the department of Psychological Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London. She has a CASE partnership with the Centre for Mental Health and is affiliated with the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health.

Her PhD project aims to analyse the association between urbanicity and psychosis, using a mixed methods approach to identify potential underlying reasons for the relationship. The project has two main strands. First, Rosanna is analysing the Social and Economic Predictors of Severe Mental Disorders  data linkage between electronic health records and the 2011 UK census.

In this analysis, she is using a multilevel modelling framework to identify individual and neighbourhood characteristics that are associated with psychotic disorders. The second strand of her thesis involves learning how people with psychosis experience the urban environment, and how they feel this relates to their mental health. This project is grounded in social epidemiology and social theory, with a focus on producing recommendations for policy and practice.

During her PhD, Rosanna has collaborated with other projects looking at ethnicity and mental health service use during the COVID-19 pandemic alongside working as a graduate teaching assistant and seminar lead on the women’s mental health module, introduction to statistics module and statistical methods in psychiatric epidemiology modules. She has also contributed to developing mental health policy recommendations through her work with the Centre for Mental Health.

Rosanna has a background in public health, completing her MSc in Public Health (Health Services Research stream) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2019 after previously working in the NHS. She then worked at King's College London as a research assistant.

First, she worked in the Centre for Implementation Science looking at the effectiveness of an intervention addressing mental health stigma. Following completion of this project, she worked in the Section of Women’s Mental Health, working on projects relating to mental health and domestic violence during and shortly after pregnancy.

Research Interests

• Health Inequality
• Social Determinants of Health
• Multilevel Modelling
• Mixed methods and collaborative research
• Severe Mental Illness

Selected Publications

Hildersley R, Oswald T, Bakolis I, et al. Ethnic inequalities in compulsory psychiatric hospital detentions during UK COVID-19 ‘lockdowns’: A Regression Discontinuity Design in time study. Published online 2025. doi:https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.05.02.25326888

Cybulski L, Chilman N, Jewell A, et al. Improving our understanding of the social determinants of mental health: a data linkage study of mental health records and the 2011 UK census. BMJ Open. 2024;14(1):e073582. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2023-073582

Hildersley R, Easter A, Bakolis I, Carson L, Howard LM. Changes in the identification and management of mental health and domestic abuse among pregnant women during the COVID-19 lockdown: regression discontinuity study. BJPsych open. 2022;8(4):e96. doi:10.1192/bjo.2022.66

Hildersley R, Potts L, Anderson C, Henderson C. Improvement for most, but not all: changes in newspaper coverage of mental illness from 2008 to 2019 in England. Epidemiol Psychiatr Sci. 2020;29:e177. doi:10.1017/S204579602000089X