Sick Normalities: Changing Practices, Changing Selves

3rd CICSI Summer School Convenors

Professsor Fabian Freyenhagen and Dr Polona Curk, founding Co-Directors of CICSI.

CICSI Summer School Speakers:

• Lisa Archibald: expert-by-experience, with 20 years of experience in setting up, coordinating and training peer communities and networks. After a rocky childhood, eventually found peer support in the 1990’s. Started to facilitate youth peer support groups initially in Scotland and then advocacy services and adult peer support groups internationally. A passionate activist for social change. Dedicated to supporting grassroots peer communities in growing and thriving without being co-opted along the way. Co-Director of International Peer Support. 
• Professor Mary Boyle: Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of East London; held NHS posts in adult mental health and women’s health. Author of “Schizophrenia: A scientific delusion?” and many articles and chapters on feminist approaches to women’s health and on problems of and alternatives to psychiatric diagnosis.  Lead author, with Lucy Johnstone, of the Power Threat Meaning Framework.
• Ed Davie (Centre for Mental Health, London): lead author of “A Mentally Healthier Nation: Towards a ten-year, cross-government plan for better prevention, equality and support; designed and delivered the Thrive LDN Mentally Healthier Councils training programme to 532 elected members in 32 boroughs; over a decade as a Local Government Association Expert Peer advising councils all over England, and serving as a senior Lambeth Councillor including as Cabinet Member and LGIU-award-winning scrutiny chair; studied social determinants of health with Professor Sir Michael Marmot at University College London. Director of Better Mental Health; Public Health Manager (Tower Hamlets); and Visiting Lecturer at King’s College London.
• Professor Françoise Davoine (formerly EHESS): Professor Emeritus at the Centre for the Study of Social Movements, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where she and Jean-Max Gaudillière conducted a weekly seminar on Madness and the Social Link for 40 years. Author of many articles and books, including Wittgenstein’s Folly, History Beyond Trauma, Madness and the Social Link, and The Birth of a Political Self. Currently working with Ukrainian psychoanalysts. 
• Professor Fabian Freyenhagen (University of Essex): Professor of Philosophy and member of the Essex Human Rights Centre. Working in areas of Social and Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Psychiatry, with a focus on mental distress and its social conditions, and on autonomy in the contexts of care. Author of Adorno's Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly, and papers on Critical Theory and Social Pathology. CICSI's founding director. Currently working on a Foucault-inspired critique of our psychiatric present.
• Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist with many years of experience, including as supervisor, deeply rooted in contemporary relational psychoanalytic theory and practice; Researcher and Academic (including at Regent's University); Theory Editor at the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling. Author and editor of several books, including The Sublime in Everyday Life and The Male in Analysis. Recent work on (our rage about) environmental destruction and how we can develop communal forms to respond.
• Professor Dainius Pūras (Vilinus University): Professor of child psychiatry and public mental health at Vilnius University, Lithuania and director of the Human Rights Monitoring Institute, an NGO based in Vilnius. Former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health. Spent the last three decades on promoting a human rights based approach to health policies and services. His 2017 report as Special Rapporteur was a landmark report on mental health provision, calling for an end to coercion and for addressing the wider social context.
• Felix Yeung (CICSI and University of Essex): Interdisciplinary research on how our social context shapes our subjectivities, our values, and our experiences of distress; and how this relates to a manic culture dominated by social media and to paranoid politics. Drawing also on his personal experience of living in Hong Kong, this social diagnosis is supplemented by investigating how collective mourning and holding practices might help us to overcome the wounding attachment we have to our neoliberal social context. Publications include an important article on psychoanalysing democracies as well as work on the ethics of AI.

Sick Normalities: Changing Practices, Changing Selves, the 3rd CICSI Summer School, is held over 2 days and consists of a mixture of presentations, interactive exercises, and case study discussions. Starting 10am on Thursday 18 September and finishing on Friday 19 September 2025 5pm (dinner on Thursday, and lunch and refreshments on both days are provided).

Here is the provisional summary of the programme:

Day 1: Ending coercion in mental health settings and preventing distress
Ending coercion is an explicit UN goal since 2017, but its implementation faces many obstacles. The first day will be dedicated to understanding how ending it was adopted as a goal by the WHO and UN, and what good practices exist that make this a feasible goal to aim for as well as how to navigate challenging situations with those in severe distress without coercion. We will also explore how to prevent distress from a rising in our psychiatric present.

Day 2: Politics, war, environmental breakdown, and changing selves

This day extends the idea that politics is and must be brought into the clinic in various ways, adjusting therapeutic interventions to respond to social patterns of distress, and acute crises such as war and environmental breakdown, as well as reflecting on our values and ways of living.

Applications for the 3rd CICSI Summer School are now open.

The fees for the Change: ending coercion in mental health settings and effecting social reform course are: 

Course fee does not include accommodation (See Accommodation section for more details).

Fee includes:

• 1 Evening meal* and networking.
• Daily lunches* and refreshments from our on-campus caterer.
• A CICSI certificate upon completing your course.

To take advantage of our Early Bird Discount please submit payment by 5 July 2025.

The delivery of this course is dependent on a minimum number of applicants. In the unlikely event that this minimum is not met, we would have to reconsider the feasibility of running this course.

Accommodation can be booked (and paid) separately. 

There are two options on campus:

Option One:

Essex University Student Accommodation: £45 per person per night (this does not include breakfast; there are various food options on campus and a supermarket nearby) or £51 per person per night, with breakfast included.

The rooms are in easy walking distance of the summer school venue.

To book please visit:

Book Bed & Breakfast accommodation at the University of Essex hotel and conference venues and enter one of the following promo codes:

CICSIRO (for room only)

CICSIBB (for bed and breakfast)

If you wish to book over the phone, you can call 01206 872358. The office opening times are Monday-Thursday (9am-5:15pm) and Friday (9am-4:30pm).

Accommodation bookings are non-refundable.

Option Two:

Wivenhoe House Hotel: this 4-Star hotel and there are a limited number of rooms available which you can book either directly by contacting reservations@wivenhoehouse.co.uk or by finding the best available rates on different platforms.