Tania Gergel

Tania Gergel is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (KCL), as part of the multi-disciplinary Mental Health and Justice research project. Her academic career began within the Classics and Philosophy Departments at King’s College London, where she specialised in ancient philosophy, in particular Plato, the Presocratics and Sophists, until 2005. Following an extended career break, she returned to academic life in 2012 and become involved with work on philosophy of medicine and psychiatry. Her research currently focuses on 'advance directives' in bipolar, in particular ‘self-binding directives’. The work includes clinical initiatives, advising policy makers on mental health law reform, legal developments, and exploring the relationship between decision-making capacity, personal identity, and illness. She also works with the McPin Foundation to coordinate patient and public involvement for the Project and conducts research on issues surrounding service user involvement. Other research interests include phenomenology; the ethics of coercion and leverage within psychiatry; medical/neuroethics; epistemic injustice and stigma; philosophy of mind. She has also taught at UCL, Birkbeck and Cambridge University.