Ruth Surtees Phd Email & Phone Number

I am a Critical Sociologist of Health and Medicine, an ex-midwife, and Mental Health Clinician/queer feminist therapist using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in my work with the Pegasus Mental Health Team in Otautahi, Christchurch, NZ. I have previous clinical experience in the fields of Eating Disorders, Addictions, Perinatal Psychiatry, General Adult Acute and Crisis Respite mental health. Alongside this I have some experience in teaching Cultural Safety Education in PostGrad Nursing and Midwifery, Clinical Supervision and University Lecturing. My work now as a therapist means I specialize in the fields of perinatal distress, the embodied experiences of Matrescence and maternal subjectivities, birth trauma and bereavement, queer sexualities, and neurodiversities. The many women/people I work with who have experienced perinatal/birth trauma of various kinds bears out just one strand of the results of my academic work and publications that explore the effects of increasingly routine or policy-driven interventions during instutionalised/hospital-based births (ie induction of labour and epidural pain relief) in otherwise well or physiological birth. This has led to the rise of what I call 'advance defensive practice' in the additional labour now required of midwives to construct themselves as risk-averse and increasingly 'auditable subjects'. These defensive practices may paradoxically lead to iatrogenic morbidity and trauma for birthing women/people, as routine interventions push the bounds of what most midwives consider to be physiological pregnancy, labour, birth and bonding. My PhD research in the Departments of Education and Sociology at the University of Canterbury and subsequent publications drew from critical feminist and post-structural theories of Foucault's governmentality to explore complex and contradictory discourses within midwifery and obstetrics in Aotearoa/New Zealand.