People

CICSI is a network of academics, independent scholars, and practitioners in various disciplines. As our work progresses, we will invite and affiliate members with expertise in a range of social concerns.

CICSI Founding Director

Prof Fabian Freyenhagen

Leading expert on the early Frankfurt School. Member of the Essex Human Rights Centre. Working in areas of Social and Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Psychiatry, focusing on mental distress and its social conditions, and autonomy in care contexts. Author of Adorno's Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly.

CICSI Co- Director

Dr Polona Curk

Interested in affective influences in relationships from a psychosocial psychoanalytic perspective, Polona has published on autonomy, destructiveness, affective equality, the concept of narcissism, and the notion of insight in mental health. Co-edited two books, The Sublime in Everyday Life, and Narcissism: A Critical Reader

Co-Director

Prof Vladimir Safatle

Professor of Philosophy & Psychology at the University of São Paulo. Examines the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis in contemporary French thought and the Frankfurt School. Responsible for the translation of Theodor W. Adorno's complete works into Portuguese and writes a column in El País.

Research Associate

Dr Timo Beeker

Practicing psychiatrist and academic researcher from Brandenburg Medical School, Germany. Works with the Open Dialogue approach. Interested in processes of medicalisation, how they are promoted and how they are experienced or resisted.

Affiliated PhD candidate

Felix Yeung

Felix's research explores how neoliberalism is related to individual suffering and how collective mourning and holding practices might respond. He asks how psychoanalytic theories might be used to "psychoanalyse" democracies.

Advisory Board

Dr Jacqui Dillon

Activist and Trainer

Hearing Voices Network

Expert-by-experience; author; activist; speaker and trainer; and former National chair of the Hearing Voices Network in England. Honorary Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the UEL. Editor of several books, including Demedicalising Misery and Models of Madness.

Dr Martin Zinkler

Klinikum Bremen-Ost, Germany

& Subcommittee on Torture

Psychiatrist and psychotherapist; heads a mental health service in Bremen, Germany. Coeditor-in-chief of "Recht & Psychiatrie", the journal of law and psychiatry for the German speaking countries. He publishes mainly on human rights in mental health care. Member of the OHCHR's Subcommittee on Torture.

Dr Benoit Eyraud

Université Lumiere Lyon 2 & Centre Max Weber

Sociologist and anthropologist, expert on welfare and civic law as well as participatory action research. Scientific lead of a program of citizen research on the exercise of the human rights of people made vulnerable by old age, illness, disability.

Prof. Dainius Pūras

Centre for Child Psychiatry, Vilnius University

Former UN Special Rapporteur on Health (2014 - 2020), focusing on mental health; Professor of child psychiatry and public mental health; human rights advocate, director of Human Rights Monitoring Institute, an NGO based in Lithuania.