Jenny Valentish Guest Lecture – Woman of Substances:  A Journey into Drugs, Alcohol and Treatment

Join us on Friday 30th November at 16:00 for a guest lecture from Jenny Valentish at The Mary Badlands Lecture Theatre, Collegiate Campus, Sheffield Hallam University.

Jenny Valentish is a UK-raised, Australia-based journalist for The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald.  She is the author of a non-fiction book, Woman of Substances: A Journey into Drugs, Alcohol and Treatment, which takes a gendered look at women’s pathways into drug use, their experiences and the ways in which they are failed by research and treatment.  Valentish interviewed 35 clinicians, neuroscientists and researchers, and used her own story as vignettes.  She explores the roles of temperament and impulsivity, and the comorbidity between problematic substance use and other behaviours and disorders, such as high-risk sex, theft, compulsive buying, self-harm, eating disorders and gambling.  She examines the media tropes of female drug users, and the social currency of women (in particular mothers) in drug-using communities, and the role that older men – or ‘brokers’ – play in the drug use of adolescent girls.

Jenny Valentish is a board director of SMART Recovery Australia, a consultant for Australia’s National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, and an ambassador for Monash University’s BrainPark.  She writes regularly about drug and alcohol issues for newspapers, including: Drug Researchers on Coming Out,Russell Brand’s AA Reform PlanThe Hidden World of Underground Psychedelic Psychotherapy and The Neglected World of Comorbid Disorders.

She will have a small number of hardbacks to sign and sell.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Tickets can be booked via:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/jenny-valentish-guest-lecture-woman-of-substances-a-journey-into-drugs-alcohol-and-treatment-tickets-52517563446