Milena Wuerth

Milena holds an ESRC UBEL studentship for her PhD in the anthropology of mental healthcare. She is part of SOAS’s Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) and in the process of conducting fieldwork. Milena completed her BA in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics (2020) and holds an MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2023). 

She was part of LSE Anthropology's Covid & Care collective, which tracked the impact of the pandemic and lockdown policies on marginalised communities in the UK. She has since worked as a research assistant for King's College London's Centre for Society & Mental Health and for SOAS's Department of Anthropology. Her PhD builds on the Anthropological Study of Peer-supported Open Dialogue (APOD), led by Professor David Mosse, which provides ethnographic insights on the rollout of the Open Dialogue approach to mental healthcare across England. Her PhD research focusses on staff experiences of organisational shifts in publicly-funded psychiatric services through participant observation and interviews in a London NHS Trust.

Wuerth, M., Storer, E., Simpson, N., Sarafian, I., & Duale, S. (2024). Securitized trust: on the multiple guises of the UK policy agenda during the Covid-19 pandemic. Critical Policy Studies, 1–21.

Mosse, D., Baker, D., Carroll, M., Chase, L., Kloocke, R., Wickremasinghe, K., Cramer, B., Pratt-Boyden, K., & Wuerth, M. (2023). The contribution of anthropology to the study of open dialogue: Ethnographic research methods and opportunities. Frontiers in Psychology, 14.

Larrieta, J., Wuerth, M., Aoun, M., Bemme, D., D’souza, N., Gumbonzvanda, N., Miguel Esponda, G., Roberts, T., Yoder-Maina, A., Zamora, E., Qureshi, O., & Giacaman, R. (2022). Transforming funding for community-based organisations: a call for equitable and sustainable funding approaches in global mental health. 

The Lancet Global Health. ; Wuerth, M. (2022). Meeting in the Middle? The slippage of “trust” in online public health briefings. Medical Anthropology Quarterly - Critical Care series (available on-line: https://medanthroquarterly.org/critical-care/2022/12/meeting-in-the-middle). ; 

Bear, L., Simpson, N., Bazambanza, C., Bowers, R., Kamal, A., Gheewala Lohiya, A., Pearson, A., Vieira, J., Watt, C. & Wuerth, M. (2021) Social infrastructures for the post-Covid recovery in the UK. Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, London, UK.

Her research interests include the social aspects of mental health and structural underpinnings of inequalities in healthcare. She is also interested in bringing life-course and genealogical approaches to the study of healthcare systems.