Mental illness and parenthood: being a parent in secure psychiatric care.

Background: Research into parenting and mental illness seldom includes forensic mental health service users, despite its relevance to therapeutic, family work and risk management.

Aims: This study aimed to understand the experiences of parents and the variety of parenting roles maintained during admission to a secure forensic hospital.

Methods: Narrative interviews with 18 parents (eight mothers and 10 fathers) at an English medium security hospital were analysed thematically, using the framework approach.

'At the hospital I learnt the truth': diagnosing male infertility in rural Malawi.

This paper examines how men's reproductive bodies are problematised in rural northern Malawi as access to biomedically defined diagnoses of the health of men's sperm contribute to the visibility of male infertility. Ethnographic research with infertile and fertile men explored pathways into the sexual health and fertility services offered in district hospitals, men's clinical engagements and masculine imaginaries. The research suggested that men's willingness to be referred for semen analysis is an extension of intensive and persistent help-seeking for childlessness instigated by couples and encouraged by families.

Combining qualitative and quantitative evidence to determine factors leading to late presentation for antiretroviral therapy in Malawi.

Background: Treatment seeking delays among people living with HIV have adverse consequences for outcome. Gender differences in treatment outcomes have been observed in sub-Saharan Africa.

Objective: To better understand antiretroviral treatment (ART) seeking behaviour in HIV-infected adults in rural Malawi.

'Real relationships': sociable interaction, material culture and imprisonment in a secure psychiatric unit.

Research into the character of social relationships in psychiatric inpatient facilities has focused on face-to-face interaction between individuals and within groups in the communal areas of wards. Using theories developed in material culture and media studies, this article argues that patients' relationships to goods, namely, photographs, cards and gifts from family or friends, televisions and radios, are important mediators and constituents of sociability. In an ethnographic study of a medium-secure psychiatric unit, I show how these goods are put to use in private space in ways that reflect and mitigate the constraints of incarceration and stigmatization.