The question running through all of my work is deceptively simple: who gets to be a victim?

Not just in mental health, but in welfare, in law, in the consulting room. The answer, I have found, is never neutral — shaped by who holds diagnostic authority, what counts as credible suffering, and whose account of their own experience is allowed to stand.

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The systems that answer that question have a history. Victimology has always sorted the credible from the incredible — the ideal victim from the one whose suffering is too messy, too chronic, too bound up with their own choices to qualify. Neoliberalism has intensified this sorting, outsourcing it to therapeutic frameworks that promise recognition while quietly encoding the same hierarchies: who deserves depth work, who gets management, what counts as recovery and for whom.

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My research examines how these mechanisms operate — in diagnostic categories that silence the people they purport to describe, in welfare systems that construct their own criteria for legitimate distress, in clinical cultures that reify particular ideals of what therapy should produce and who should benefit from it. Diagnosis is one site of this — important, but not the whole story. What interests me most is what happens further in: how these systems get inside survivors and shape the project of having a sustainable self. The person who has internalised a verdict about whether their suffering counts. The inner landscape produced by decades of being sorted into the undeserving.

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That is where the scholarship, activism and clinical work meet — and why, for me, they have never been separable.