Partnership with the new Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA)

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has partnered with the new Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA), established at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

CAMHRA will be a centre of research excellence dedicated to anthropological research in mental health and care – using ethnographic research methods, education and public engagement to develop our understanding of how societies can engage with, and respond to, mental distress and build effective systems of care.

Funding for this ground-breaking initiative includes a 5-year investment from UKRI Research England’s Expanding Excellence in England Fund, which identifies research units recognised as excellent and having the potential to grow.

CAMHRA will have a particular mandate to understand the complex and intersectional mental health needs of London’s diverse populations. To achieve this, it will be working in partnership with a number of London NHS Trusts, councils, other statutory bodies, and voluntary and community groups – including The Tavistock and Portman.

This distinctive institutional partnership will allow for the development of new, joint opportunities in training, development, research and clinical supervision. Drawing on our mutual appreciation of interdisciplinary collaboration, our shared vision for the health of the capital’s communities, and our aim of developing holistic research methods, the partnership will commence in earnest this Autumn, with workshops for doctoral students from our two institutions, and staff from The Tavistock and Portman offering supervision to ethnographers and doctoral students in anthropology at SOAS.

Renowned systemic psychotherapist and course lead for our professional doctorate in Advanced practice and research: systemic psychotherapy (M10), Dr Britt Krause, has been instrumental in establishing this new partnership. She explained: “This is a great opportunity for systemic psychotherapy and anthropology to come together and develop approaches in clinical practice and research which take account of cultural, social, political, economic, familial and psychological contexts. It is also an opportunity for The Tavistock and Portman to champion our dynamic and reflexive approaches to relationships in new disciplinary fields and to make training available for a wider group of students. We envisage a growing collaboration in the Master’s and doctoral programmes between our two institutions.”

SOAS’s Professor David Mosse added: “The partnership between SOAS-CAMHRA and The Tavistock and Portman offers a unique opportunity to develop a specialist doctoral training programme addressing an unmet need in ethnographic research on mental health, including in clinical settings with vulnerable people which requires psychological awareness and skills for appropriate responses and self-care. The combination of specialist input on clinical ethnography from The Tavistock and Portman and the globally-facing anthropological expertise at SOAS will create a resource of value well beyond our immediate London setting.”

Our Chief Education and Training Officer, Professor Mark Freestone, concluded: “The collaboration between anthropology and psychodynamic thought has produced some fertile and transformative work over the past century and it is the perfect time to revisit and update some of these ideas. This partnership will marry the innovating methodological strengths of SOAS anthropology with the clinical insights and systems thinking of the Tavistock and Portman’s work in what we hope will promote understanding at a national level.”