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A nna Lavis is a Lecturer in Medical Sociology and Qualitative Methods in the Social Studies in Medicine (SSiM) Team in the Institute of Applied Health Research at the University of Birmingham. She also holds an honorary research position in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Her work explores individuals’ and informal caregivers’ experiences and subjectivities of mental illness and distress across a range of social and cultural contexts, both offline and on social media, with a particular focus on eating disorders and self-harm.  In this post Eugenia Lancellotta interviews Anna on her latest project, Virtual Scars: Exploring the Ethics of Care on Social Media through Interactions Around Self-Injury , funded by the Wellcome Trust, Seed Award in Humanities and Social Science. EL: How did you become interested in the ethics of care in self-harming online communities? AL: I started work on relationships between social media and mental health...

On 15th October the Institute for Mental Health  (IMH) had its Inaugural Forum at Hornton Grange at the University of Birmingham. The event was live-tweeted by the Mental Elf and the IMH. The whole project PERFECT team attended the Forum and this report comes from their collective notes. In the morning session, Eoin Killackey (Orygen) and Paul Burstow (IMH) started the day with two fascinating talks on youth mental health. Killackey gave a very international talk, analysing a variety of interventions and forms of support available for young people across the world, reflecting on the many lessons those who wish to improve the UK youth mental health system can learn from these programs.  Two particularly interesting focal points were on how to improve the transition from youth to adult services, and how to better separate services on the basis of demographic and developmental evidence about the prevalence and nature of youth mental health difficulties.  Burstow spoke of ...