Plans & Prospects 2023

The healing power of movement
Student profile
Chatting with first-year psychiatry DPhil student and Oxford University salsa coach Brennan Delattre, it’s tempting to book
yourself into your nearest dance class. Brennan is the first holder of the Rachel Conrad Scholarship for the study of Clinical
Depression, a unique endowed scholarship established in 2021 thanks to a generous legacy from Reuben Conrad CBE, a longtime
member of Common Room. Her passion for helping others heal through movement is infectious and, with future plans to
work with the NHS on reducing waiting times for mental health patients, Brennan’s is certainly a career to watch.
DPhil Psychiatry, 2022
Back in Minnesota, where I’m from, my
aunt helped with cotillion. It was really
social and etiquette training dance - not
quite big southern belle dresses. When I
was about 10 years old, they didn’t have
enough young girls in my age category,
so my aunt persuaded me to sign up.
When I started it meant white gloves
(and not really wanting to touch the
boys), but as it was a family thing I stuck
with it, and I ended up teaching when
I was just 16. I continued right through
to when I was 18 before I went off
to Middlebury College in Vermont to
study neuroscience. It was there that I
got really into swing dancing and also
capoeira (a dancelike martial art from
Brazil, performed to the accompaniment
of call-and-response choral singing and
percussive instrumental music) which
I discovered through my orientation
trip for my undergrad. Members of
the university were teaching it in
Portuguese and I went in with no prior
knowledge or experience and just really
fell in love with it. I studied abroad in
Brazil and I was lucky enough to see
capoeira performed by people of many
sociodemographic backgrounds, races,
and genders.
People would walk into these capoeira
classes and they would walk out saying
that they felt better. And I started
hearing people tell me stories of how
“capoeira saved my life” or “it helped
me get through my divorce”. I was
studying neuroscience at the time and I
used to think I was going to be a clinical
psychologist, but that came with the
difficulty of needing to pick a country,
or a state because it’s really difficult to
get re-certified between places. And as
someone who loves to travel, it didn’t
make a lot of sense to me.
I really love research and my background
is neuroscience. I consider myself more
of a social psychologist and somebody
who’s interested in intervention efficacy,
but in socially-based interventions to
supplement pharmacologically-based
interventions. So as I was learning
about neuroscience whilst also watching
people in capoeira walking in and out of
these classes feeling better, I began to
wonder if that’s something that could be
harnessed into an intervention? What
is it about capoeira? Is it the singing? Is
it the dancing? Is it the interpersonal
movement in synchronisation? What is
it and how could that then be used to
benefit people en masse?
Its potential as an intervention is huge,
because it’s cost-effective, non-invasive,
and really quite accessible. As my PhD
has progressed I have moved from
capoeira to salsa dance, after interviews
revealed a preference in young people,
but the active component I’m most
interested in is the co-operative
movement, as it seems like a really
important avenue for research. This is
especially true given the current mental
health crisis that we’re in following the
pandemic.
Currently, if you try to find mental
health care through the NHS, waiting
times are really long. There’s research
that shows that as you wait, you will get
Above & Left: Brennan as coach for the
Oxford University Salsa Society /
Credit: BubbleGum Media
worse and you will most likely do worse
in treatment once you get it. There are
low-intensity interventions already in
use, like exercise or guided self-help, but
there are also a lot of people who are
teaching things like salsa and capoeira in
the community. Our theory is that these
things could be helpful in the same way
as other low-intensity interventions. If
the evidence backs the hypothesis, we
could then connect existing resources
in the community to an existing need,
getting people off the waiting list in a
way that could be really beneficial for
them and the healthcare system.
What drew me to neuroscience,
psychology and psychiatry is wanting to
better understand how humans work,
but also to facilitate connecting existing
resources to the people who need them.
Dance has been so good in my own
life and I have anecdotally wandered
through the world hearing similar stories
from lots of other people internationally.
So if the research my PhD is based on
says that it would be useful to have
something like this as part of NHS
treatments, then that would be amazing.
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