Christine Aastrup Nyquist is a psychologist specializing in clinical adult psychology. Since 2016, she has been involved in the establishment and development of The Medication Free Treatment Unit (now renamed The Recovery Unit) at the University Hospital of Northern Norway (UNN) in Tromsø, and has been the section leader for this service since 2021. She is concerned with the contextual, psychosocial and relational aspects of mental health work, and with highlighting the human and meaning-making frameworks around recovery processes. In her work, she highlights the importance of the psychosocial and relational aspects, and how recovery does not happen in isolation, but in community. A consistent commitment in her work is how we can create health services that actually accommodate people’s experiences – services that are more open, more flexible and more in contact with society. She is concerned with how we can build systems that not only treat symptoms, but that facilitate meaning, belonging and real participation.
Christine works on questions about how we can develop more sustainable and humane healthcare services, and how the field can move towards greater openness, real freedom of choice, and a greater diversity of treatment and understanding models in mental health care.