Medical sociology/sociology of mental health; service user-led/survivor research in mental health; the intersections of physical and mental health; critical approaches to Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in health/mental health research; psychosocial aspects of childhood chronic illness; educational and social exclusion in young people; youth justice; theory and practice of critical ethnography; theory and practice of qualitative research with a particular focus on narrative and biographical research; the use of critical autoethnography in mental health research;  the use of visual methods in health-related social research. 

Dina Poursanidou has a background in psychology and education and has been a University-based social science researcher since 2000. Her research has spanned a range of fields, such as mental health, education, child health, youth justice, and social policy/social welfare. Dina started using mental health services in 1991. In the period 2010-2014, following a very severe and enduring mental health crisis between July 2008 and June 2010, Dina worked in two Universities in the north of England as a Service User Researcher. Between February 2015 and January 2017 she worked at the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London where she held a 3-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) and Improvement/Implementation Science. During her time at SURE she carried out a process evaluation of a violence reduction programme on inpatient psychiatric wards using a service user-led critical ethnographic approach. Since 2010 Dina has been involved in mental health politics and she is a member of the Asylum magazine editorial collective– Asylum, the magazine for democratic psychiatry, provides an open forum for critical reflection and discussion of mental health issues. Since July 2017 she has also been a member of the UK-based National Survivor User Network (NSUN) and its Survivor Researcher Network (SRN) Working Group.