Congratulations to our 2025 Early Career Development Award winner, Harry Whittle, for his piece, Ronaldo on the Clapham Omnibus: Complex Recoveries in Complex Psychosis.

Harry is a psychiatrist and anthropologist in training. He is currently a doctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS University of London, where he is part of the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA). Harry’s research focuses on ideas of recovery, rehabilitation, and community in mental health and mental health services, particularly in relation to people living with more complex, severe, and enduring forms of psychosis.  

When asked about his article, Harry said:

In the article, I think critically about recovery in psychosis. I ask how it complicates our understanding of recovery if we consider the experiences of people with the most complex forms of psychosis, who have inadvertently been excluded from much debate on this topic. Drawing on six months of ethnography on an inpatient psychiatric rehabilitation unit, the article centres around a man I call Shepherd, whose journey to becoming a more confident, calmer, happier person was characterised by caution, masking, social withdrawal, and scepticism towards hope. These are embodied practices that seem incompatible with many portraits of recovery in the literature. Yet, here, they enabled—or even constituted—Shepherd’s recovery. The social complexities and ambivalences in his story reflect not only how complex recovery can be, but also how complex people’s relationships with mental health services can be. During his lengthy psychiatric admission, the coercive structures of the hospital were difficult to separate from the time, space, and relative safety they afforded Shepherd, which allowed him to figure out his recovery for himself. If we oversimplify recovery by missing people like Shepherd, we risk structurally undermining the interventions—like inpatient rehabilitation here—that may best support them to live well.

Congratulations, well earned!