Dr Matthew Oakes Joined Liverpool Hope University in February 2022, having previously held a lecturing / digital education post in the Psychosocial Studies Department at the University of London, Birkbeck. His doctoral research applied existential-phenomenology as a means of understanding mental health with the contemporary, neoliberal landscape. He continues to research and publish with an interdisciplinary approach, specifically applying existential thought, reconceptualising the experience of psychic suffering beyond a deficit model of mental illness.