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 fields. My current work explores suicide and suicide prevention, with particular attention to LGBTQ+ suicide. This work is informed by critical suicide studies, an emergent field that draws on a number of different disciplines – including poststructuralist, queer and feminist theory – to demonstrate how suicide and the suicidal subject are constructed by dominant cultural discourses.