Category
Projects
What are the main challenges that mental health professionals face when working with LGBTQIA+ people? What does it mean for us to work from a depathologising and affirmative approach? What socio-political, cultural, economic and institutional contexts must be considered when thinking about this work? How do we build solidarity networks to resist current attacks on affirmative care, and what can we learn from the struggles and experiences of colleagues situated in different locations?
In this post, we share a report documenting the main lessons learned through the exchanges and the stories the participants told about their practice in Chile and the UK.
The final report ‘Pathways between LGBTQ migration, social isolation and distress: Liberation, care and loneliness’ was published on 28th September 2022. THis can be accessed via this post along with a summary.
This research entitled ‘Pathways between LGBTQ migration, social isolation & distress: liberation, care and loneliness’ was a collaboration between academics at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Transforming Gender and Sexuality, and MindOut LGBTQ mental health charity. It involved in-depth interviews with MindOut service-users who had relocated to Brighton internationally and from within the UK.
The project aimed to understand how LGBTQ people’s migratory journeys and experiences of loneliness and isolation, as well as belonging, contributed to their mental health in Brighton. We used creative methods, like map-making and drawing, to help people capture their journeys and experiences.
The COVID-19 pandemic put many LGBTQ+ young people at risk in the UK, with many living in hostile or unsafe environments, experiencing isolation, mental health pressures and homelessness. In the UK young LGBTQ+ people’s experience was compounded by an increasingly hostile public climate around trans and gender-diverse young people’s rights. The demand on organisations providing support increased significantly, with the LGBTQ+ helpline Switchboard reporting 20% more calls and LGBTQ+ homelessness charities saw a substantial rise in referrals. Community organisations supporting LGBTQ+ young people took a lead by rapidly developing digitally delivered services to continue supporting young people.
Working together with community partners Allsorts Youth Project, AKT, Comics Youth and Mosaic, a University of Brighton research team, investigated the transformations in digital youth work that organisations embarked on, centring both young people’s experience and the youth workers’ perspectives.
Men’s unwanted sexual experiences (MUSE) – or sexual violence and harassment towards men – remains an under explored topic of research in the UK, where men rarely seek formal or informal support for their experiences. A recent survey by the… Continue Reading →
CTSG Project Bearspace by Dr Nick McGlynn University of Brighton 2022. Findings now published. Bearspace is a groundbreaking research project that has been investigating the experiences of fat gay, bi and queer (GBQ) men in spaces used and created by… Continue Reading →
Dr Nick McGlyn‘s research project attends to an unexplored intersection of geographies of sexualities, and fatness/obesity. In a nation grappling with an ‘obesity epidemic’, fat people in the UK are highly stigmatised as unhealthy and sexually repulsive, with resultant serious… Continue Reading →
