Staff profile

I am an interdisciplinary medical humanities researcher, bringing together social science and literary studies methods to explore narratives and experiences of madness and mental distress. I am co-lead of the Narrative Practices Lab, within the Discovery Researh Platform for Medical Humanities. The Lab is an interdisciplinary research-practice hub which focuses on the pluralist, political and aesthetic complexities of storytelling and engages critically with its function and effects in diverse contexts.    I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities where I am studying anxiety. In particular, I am interested in how anxiety is depicted in fiction, how these depictions are understood and assessed by people with experience of anxiety, and how anxiety might impact practices of reading and viewing fiction. This work emerges out of my PhD, which explored cultural representations of self-harm in literature, film, and television.   Throughout my work I use interdisciplinary methods to re-centre lived experience of madness and mental distress within questions of literary analysis and interpretation. Through this I explore broader questions of the relationship between the social and the cultural, the role of fictional texts in constructions of subjectivity, and the tension between personal sense-making and broader structural formations of meaning. Blending sociological discourse analysis and literary close reading I connect literary questions of genre, form, voice and narrative structure to sociological questions of identity, experience and chronicity. A short introduction to my research and the topic of narratives of self-harm, originally presented at a Time to Change event held on World Mental Health Day, can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/t3b06XaEmKA    I am committed to critical and innovative interventions in the Medical Humanities in order to ensure that research on mental health is conducted in ways that are accessible, collaborative, and experience-led. In my research I work closely with an advisory group of people with lived experience, who collaboratively discuss and make decisions about methods, research questions, and research practices. I have also been involved with other community-based work, for instance organising events with Time to Change and their Young Champions. I am a member of the Cost of Living blog editorial collective, and have also written for a number of other non-academic publications. In collaboration with Self-Injury Support I edited a zine featuring creative work by people with experience of self-harm, which can be found here: https://www.makespaceco.org/learn 

Blogs and Book Reviews

Make Space

Journal Article

• Heney, V. (online). Unending and uncertain: thinking through a phenomenological consideration of self-harm towards a feminist understanding of embodied agency. Journal of international women's studies,
• Moran, P., Chandler, A., Dudgeon, P., Kirtley, O. J., Knipe, D., Pirkis, J., Sinyor, M., Allister, R., Ansloos, J., Ball, M. A., Chan, L. F., Darwin, L., Derry, K. L., Hawton, K., Heney, V., Hetrick, S., Li, A., Machado, D. B., McAllister, E., McDaid, D., …Christensen, H. (2024). The Lancet Commission on self-harm. The Lancet, 404(10461), 1445-1492. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736%2824%2901121-8
• Heney, V. (2024). Storying self-harm. The Lancet, 403(10428), 720-721. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736%2824%2900253-8
• researchers, ‘publics’ and institutions. Sociology of Health & Illness, 44(S1), 179-194. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13418
• Dixon-Woods, M., Campbell, A., Chang, T., Martin, G., Georgiadis, A., Heney, V., Chew, S., Van Citters, A., Sabados, K., & Nelson, E. (2020). A qualitative study of design stakeholders’ views of developing and implementing a registry-based learning health system. Implementation Science, 15, Article 16 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-020-0976-1