dr. N.S. de Boer (Nina)

Nina's work addresses mental suffering and how we use psychiatric theories and (scientific) models to make sense of mental ill-health experiences. Her projects center on systemic and complexity-driven approaches to mental disorders, including the network approach, and lie at the intersections of philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of science, and philosophy of cognition.

From October 2025 onward, Nina will work as a postdoctoral researcher on the project 'Experiencing complexity: Reconceptualizing experiential knowledge in mental health care'. In this project, she will explore whether conceptual tools provided by complexity thinking could help form a theoretical foundation for experiential knowledge in mental health care, and if so, how this might benefit the practice of experts-by-experience.
The project will combine philosophical and qualitative research and was funded by an NWO Open Competition XS grant.

Previously, Nina worked as a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of Mind and Language at Radboud University. She defended her PhD thesis, 'Reimagining psychiatry: A practice-oriented evaluation of the network approach', in November 2025.