Dr Charles Marley
Programme Director - MSc Mental Health in Children and Young People; Academic Programme Coordinator - MSc Clinical Education
Background
I completed my undergraduate and master degrees in Glasgow before completing clinical training in Birmingham in 2007, joining the section of clinical psychology at the university in 2010. I hold three roles at the University, two in the School of Health and Social Science and one in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.
I hold three roles at the University, two in the School of Health and Social Science and one in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. My roles in the School of Health and Social Science are the Programme Director of the MSc Mental Health of Children and Young People: Psychological Approaches. The programme offers a unique perspective: that children and young people’s mental health and well-being is influenced by developmental processes at multiple levels, from individual to socio-cultural and that approaches to working with mental health and well-being need to be informed by this dynamic and interactional system. The programme is part time, fully online, and has been designed with recent graduates and professionals in mind. I am also the School of Health and Social Science Director for Technology Enhanced Learning.
In the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, I am an Academic Programme Coordinator on the MSc in Clinical Education. Teaching on this programme involves development of an online, distance learning curriculum, as well as teaching, assessment, student support and dissertation supervision of a wide range of healthcare professionals – including doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other allied health professionals – involved in undergraduate and postgraduate education.
My clinical practice and research interests are underpinned by the principles of developmental psychology and psychopathology. I am also interested in the application of critical theory to children and young people's mental health and wellbeing. This approach remains informed by the principles of developmental psychology and psychopathology but focuses on how cultural, political, and economic factors interact with local contextual factors to inform the everyday practices regarding children and young people's mental health and wellbeing.
In my teaching roles, my aim is to create as inclusive and engaging learning process as is possible, one that encourages students to feel comfortable in taking a critical perspective on teaching content and their experience of learning, including my teaching and the teaching approaches I adopt. I believe this constructive critical dialogue between students, tutor, and content and teaching approach optimises student engagement by positioning students and tutor as participants in knowledge production. For me, this facilitates learning through the creation of an intellectually stimulating learning environment and provides resources for further inquiry beyond education.
Qualifications
ClinPsyD
PhD
Responsibilities & affiliations
School of Health in Social Science: Director for Technology Enhanced Learning
Programme Director: MSc Mental Health in Children and Young People: Psychological Approaches
Academic Programme Coordinator: MSc Clinical Education
Postgraduate teaching
OL MSc Mental Health in Children and Young People: Psychological Approaches
I am the Programme Director for the online Mental Health in Children and Young People: Psychological Approaches programme
I also cooridnate two courses on the MSc: Social Inequality and Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Critical Psychology and Child Mental Health
MSc Clinical Education
I am part of the MSc Clinical Education academic team, primarily contributing towards dissertation supervision and research methods teaching.
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Research summary
My research focus relates to the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. I am interested in how the knowledges and practices that structure everyday social action relating to mental health and wellbeing emerge from within an ‘apparatus’ of interconnected cultural, political, and economic factors. My approach draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Nickolas Rose, Carol Bacchi, and João Biehl. By utilising various strands of their approaches, my approach engages with the nexus of elements that condition how we understand problems and the solutions generated to solve them. I utilise a critical ethnographic approach to create ethnographic ‘case studies’ that connect everyday social action relating to mental health and wellbeing to a multitude of influencing social, institutional, political/policy factors that play a role in conditioning the possibility of these everyday practices to be in place. My work overlaps with an emerging area within global mental health studies. There have been calls within this theoretical domain for approaches that consider cultural, political, and economic factors and their interaction with local contextual factors. The approach I adopt is an ‘at-home’ ethnography, one that utilises the constructs and theoretical approach emerging within the global health movement.
Current research interests
Critical approaches to children and young people's mental health and wellbeing Foucauldian Apparatus/Discourse Analysis Critical ethnography Critical global health studies Trans-disciplinary ethnographic research regarding subjectivityPast research interests
Resilience and protective factors among refugee children and young people post migration to high-income countries: A systematic review Broken brains or flawed studies? An update on Leo and Cohen's (2003) critical review of ADHD neuroimaging.Affiliated research centres
Project activity
A Foucauldian-inspired ethnographic investigation: The emergence of the everyday social practice of ADHD
The investigation utilised an ethnographic approach, and the scholarship of Michel Foucault and João Biehl, to reconnect the wider social, political and institutional factors that were influential in the formation of a particular form of ADHD related health care. By utilising various strands of theoretical and empirical material from both authors, the study aimed to reconnect the nexus of elements that conditioned the possibility for the everyday social practice of ADHD to be in place within an NHS region in Scotland in the present moment.
An overarching aim was to consider ADHD from outside its dominant biomedical explanation by examining the wider context and processes that conditioned the possibility for the emergence of a local approach to ADHD diagnosis and treatment. The investigation made use of the ethnographic approach of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment as a methodological guide. Vita reconnects the ‘nexus of elements’ – the ‘invisible machinery’ – that allowed for individuals to be represented as mentally defective.
The analytic approach for the investigation made use of the concept of ‘problematisation’, which captures a two-stage process – the questioning of how and why certain ‘things’ become a problem, but also how these ‘things’ are shaped as the objects that they become. The object of interest for this investigation was ‘young people’ and how they were problematised and shaped as the target of certain knowledges. It was through this process – the how of their construction as a problem – that the investigation made the connections that provided the authority for particular problem explanations to be installed as ‘real’ over other possibilities.
The study constructs a genealogical account of the emergence of the local social practice of ADHD, one that maps and makes visible the multiplicity of events implicated in the construction of young people as particular types of problems and which conditioned the possibility for the social practice of ADHD to become the current means by which young people become known as problems. The genealogy is considered a theoretical redescription of the rise of ADHD diagnosis and treatment locally, one that troubles accepted explanations by revealing the wider complex network from which the social practice emerged.
Conference details
European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, 2019: Researching Mental Health and Wellbeing