The Psychic Life of Time investigates the timing of mental healthcare.
In partnership with the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust – a specialist NHS trust with a long history of pioneering psychodynamic approaches to mental health and emotional wellbeing – we are investigating how time can promote psychological and emotional change, especially for young people.
We are working with mental health practitioners across the services for children, young people and families, to understand how time functions in their work. We are co-producing narratives with young people and their carers about how time shapes their mental health, and their lives more broadly. We are collaborating with the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) to better understand a highly charged issue for the trans community – the timing of prescribing hormone blockers to delay the onset of puberty – that is constantly negotiated by young people, their carers and practitioners in the service.
The Psychic Life of Time is producing a detailed and nuanced account of the way that time can operate as a mode of care in mental health treatment, and in support for transitions in emotional life and identity.
