Professor Tania Gergel is Director of Research at Bipolar UK, an Honorary Professor Visiting Professor in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences at Cardiff University. She joined Bipolar UK in 2023 in order to establish an in-house research division within the Charity and is now a lead on multiple research projects focusing on bipolar and other severe mental illness, as well as prominent advocate for lived experience involvement. A particular focus of her current work is suicide, mixed states, and diagnostic issues relating to bipolar. After beginning her academic career Ancient Philosophy, she moved towards Philosophy of Medicine and joined the IoPPN, King’s College London, in 2012 specialising in mental health, ethics, law and the phenomenology of severe mental illness. Her primary focus was the clinical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding the creation and use of advance directives in severe and episodic mental health conditions, also partnering with the Department of Health and Social Care to advise on the upcoming introduction of statutory provision for ‘advance choice documents’ within the (England and Wales) Mental Health Act. In 2023 she launched a website/video resources, www.advancechoice.org, designed to create an internationally accessible introduction for all stakeholders to advance choice documents. Her work focuses on putting the lived experience of mental illness at the centre of mental health research and policy, and she is internationally recognised for her work on advance directives, bipolar, ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and innovation within coproduction.

As a member of Centre for Humanities and Health at King's College London, she is particularly interested in the epistemology of lived experience in understanding and treating mental illness, and how severe mental health conditions impact upon personal identify.

See more on Tania's Orcid profile.

Research interests

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