Tania Gergel

Biography

Tania is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow with the Mental Health and Justice research project, where she co-leads research on 'advance directives' in bipolar, including clinical initiatives; advising policy makers on mental health law reform, legal developments and exploring the relationship between personal identity and illness. She also works with the McPin Foundation to coordinate patient and public involvement.

Although Tania’s academic background was in ancient philosophy, her research now focuses on mental health, ethics and law/philosophy of medicine, with areas of interest including: advance decision making and decision making capacity; the ethics of coercion and leverage within psychiatry; personal identity and mental disorder; phenomenology and stigma.

After completing a PhD at King’s in 2000, Tania was a lecturer in the Classics Department until 2005. Following an extended career break, Tania returned to academic life in 2012 and become involved with work on philosophy of medicine and psychiatry. She first joined the MHEL Research Group as a Visiting Research Fellow in ‘Philosophy and Psychiatry’ in 2015. Tania has also taught at UCL, Birkbeck and Cambridge University.

Research interests

• Philosophy of psychiatry
• Mental health ethics and law
• Philosophy of medicine
• Phenomenology and postmodernist philosophy
• Ancient philosophy