Four connected fields of work

Since 2010 Merel has worked in forensic psychiatry as a psychiatrist and Pro Justitia assessor for the Netherlands Institute of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology (NIFP). Since 2022 she has also supervised Pro Justitia assessments.

The work calls for careful examination, holding several perspectives alongside one another, and the patience to understand behaviour within the personal and social context in which it arose. Conclusions are drawn only when they can be justified.

For several years Merel worked in neuropsychiatry, including at Vesalius, caring for people living with brain injury.

That experience made visible how closely brain, behaviour, emotion and everyday functioning are connected. What may look like character or unwillingness from a distance often turns out, on closer examination, to involve reduced overview, slower information processing or altered emotion regulation.

Merel worked for a period in a gynaecology outpatient clinic, deepening her knowledge of how hormones influence physical, psychological and cognitive functioning.

She focuses in particular on complaints that regular care still recognises or understands insufficiently, and on the connection between body and mind that is too often pulled apart.

As an independent policy adviser and qualitative researcher, Merel works on diversity, equity and psychological safety in the workplace.

Her attention goes to psychological safety, neurodiversity, group dynamics, leadership, language and representation, unconscious bias, and the question of how awareness actually becomes lasting behavioural change.