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Jorun Rugkåsa

Cand Mag, Cand Polit, PhD


Research Fellow

  • Social Psychiatry Group, University of Oxford
  • and
  • Health Services Research Unit, Akershus University Hospital, Norway

I joined the Social Psychiatry Group in May 2008. My research interests include treatment pressure and coercion in community mental health services and the role of family carers of people with mental health problems. I currently manage the OCTET study, which comprises of a large randomised controlled trial of community treatment orders and qualitative studies of how community compulsion is experienced by patients, their families and clinicians. I also manage the AMEND study, where we are one of three sites, and which assesses how changes in the definition of mental disorder and the detention criteria in the 2007 MHA impact on clinical practice.

Before joining the group I was at the University of Westminster where I researched the experiences of carers of people with severe mental health problems in Black and minority ethnic communities. This was a collaboration with the Health Experiences Research Group at the Department of Primary Health Care at University of Oxford, where I was a visiting academic.

I originally trained as a Social Anthropologist at the University of Oslo and spent 12 months conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a Filipino village. After completing my studies I moved to Northern Ireland where I worked for nearly ten years at the social science end of Public Health, specialising in the evaluation of complex social interventions to reduce health inequalities. I hold a PhD in Sociology from Queen’s University Belfast.

I have recently taken up a post as Senior Research Fellow at the Health Services Research Unit at Akershus University Hospital in Norway. Here I hope to develop a programme of work around coercion and pressure in Norwegian mental health care.

Recent publications

More publications