Dr Mark Sladen
Research Fellow
Contact details
- Email: msladen@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Doorway 6, Old Medical School
Teviot Place - City
- Post code
- EH8 9AG
Background
At the University of Edinburgh I am the Research Fellow on Rain Within the Rainbow, a five-year project, funded by Wellcome, which seeks to transform understandings of suicide and suicide prevention in LGBTQ+ communities in the UK.
Prior to this role I gained a wide variety of experience in the arts and in the voluntary sector. For over twenty years my principal work was as a contemporary art curator, after which I took a career break to write a PhD, which explored queer art and activism in the shadow of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Since completing my PhD in 2021 I have worked as a researcher, starting out in the voluntary sector and developing research interests around two main topics: LGBTQ+ communities; and mental health.
My first postdoctoral experience was gained on Precarious Lives, a three-year research project, funded by Trust for London, which employed qualitative methods to explore poverty among LGBTQ+ over-50s in London. This project was initiated by Opening Doors and, after the closure of the latter, was concluded by Tonic Housing in 2025. Subsequently I co-wrote two reports for Centre for Mental Health: Shifting Power (2026), which explored the role of population-level, anti-racist interventions in addressing inequities in mental health; and Inquiry into Interdisciplinary Mental Health Research (2026), a rapid review, commissioned by the NIHR, into the expanding role of interdisciplinary practice in mental health research.
Research summary
I am an interdisciplinary, qualitative researcher in health and associated topics. My current work on Rain Within the Rainbow explores suicide and suicide prevention, with particular attention to LGBTQ+ suicide. This work is informed by critical suicide studies, an emergent field of research, practice and activism that challenges traditional biomedical approaches to suicide, instead examining the broader social and cultural forces that shape suicidal distress.