Reitske Meganck
Motivation
What is your main driver for doing research?
Having space to study and understand complex issues.
Giving space to those who do not always get a voice in society.
Making space for what mental suffering and well-being means and how we can relate to it.
Why do you believe that strengthening mental health is so important?
Between health and illness, normality and abnormality, the line is hard to draw. The human condition is something we all share and with which each person struggles in their own way. Understanding how people deal with the issues and impossibilities of being human can also allow people to find more room to move in it.
For me, research is also a way of questioning that very boundary between healthy and unhealthy and expert and help-seeker.
How could research change the world?
By continuing to ask questions, to critically challenge society and the self-evidences put forward by social and scientific narratives of how to live well. That also means remaining critical of one's own discipline and questioning its direction and how it thinks it can change the world.
Research can keep minds open and surprised, but only if we remain open to what surprises, unexpectedly, and willing and daring to break new ground.
With whom outside academia did you already collaborate and achieved important results?
I was already working with several psychotherapy institutions where we could contribute to more informed reflective practice for the counseling team through practice-based research.
The development of the Single Case Archive, a database that aims to make single case studies accessible to researchers, students and clinicians, was a collaboration with partners outside the university.
But perhaps most important of all is my clinical work, where people give me the confidence to set out with them and seek together how to find more room to move in the complexity of human existence.
Publications
https://biblio.ugent.be/person/801002035037