UCL student awarded prize for essay on disfigurement

A UCL Medical School student has won the Changing Faces? annual essay competition open to health professionals, postgraduates and undergraduates on the theme of coping with disfigurement. ?Coping With Disfigurement: Psychosocial Mechanisms? won Charles Gallagher £500 for his interpretation of the subject in the competition run by Changing Faces, the UK charity that supports and represents people who have disfigurements of the face or body from any cause. Charles was co-winner alongside Ben Baker, an undergraduate medical student from the University of Nottingham. Charles, a medical student in his fifth year at UCL Medical School, looked at the important and interesting theories of the psychosocial mechanisms of coping with visible difference. He wrote: 'Society encourages us to stigmatize by appearance from childhood, be it Cinderella's (cruel, jealous) Ugly Stepsisters, the terrifying (and hideous) Wicked Witch of the West, or the murderous (and disfigured) Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Our obsession with appearance diminishes those who fall short of a perceived ideal, and those with a visible difference, being furthest down the ladder of beauty, are devalued most. Charles said: 'Disfigurement has been described as 'the last bastion of discrimination?. Many people have encountered discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, religion or disability, but people with visible difference encounter negative reactions literally dozens of times a day if they are brave enough to leave the house.