Services
I accept private referrals as well as those from Health Boards, and the criminal Justice system, providing psychological assessment, formulation and one to one short, medium as well as longer term more specialist therapeutic interventions for adults with more complex mental health presentations. I also provide cross professional clinical supervision, group reflective practice, design, develop and deliver bespoke trainings and themed workshops.
Collaborative personalised psychological assessment
Any therapeutic process begins with and is informed by a thorough standardised but personalised psychological assessment.
Collaborative and agreed formulation
Untangle and understand what is driving, maintaining and how to alleviate your symptoms in a personalised and dynamic therapeutic intervention.
Multi modal compassionate inquiry
To be effective and realise sustainable change, therapy must be a collaborative and compassionate process.
Collaborative personalised psychological assessment
Any therapeutic process begins with and is informed by a thorough standardised but personalised psychological assessment. While this may sound daunting and despite what the name implies it is not a test and there are no right or wrong answers.
It is neither prescriptive, nor interrogative but a necessarily collaborative process which privileges and gathers all the relevant information unique to your own lived experience to:
(1) identify the approximate onset of and what you perceive as your key challenges
(2) identify predisposing factors alongside understand how unresolved experiences from the past can out of awareness contribute or add to present challenges
(3) identify precipitating factors, these can be either internal thoughts and feelings or interrelated external events – life changes, for example the loss or breakdown of a significant relationship, loss of employment etc
(4) identify habitual negative thought and behavioural patterns, which out of awareness maintain or add to distress
(5) identify strengths and healthy coping strategies which alongside cultivating a compassionate awareness and self-worth can be realised and built upon to skillfully deal with existing or inevitable future challenges.
You may also be asked to complete some short standardised self-report questionnaires which screen for the nature and severity of symptoms alongside understand the impact on your ability to function in various areas such as work or interpersonal relationships. It is important, however, to stress that these questionnaires are not meant to and do not provide nor confirm a formal psychiatric diagnosis.
Collaborative and agreed formulation
There is no current physical nor pathological diagnostic test which confirms the presence or absence of a mental health condition. Diagnosis therefore relies on identifying the presence of somewhat arbitrary symptom clusters or descriptors thought to be indicative of a specific disorder.
In contrast a collaborative, dynamic and personalised formulation is less interested in identifying what is wrong with you and more curious in finding out about what has happened to you. The latter helps to tease out, untangle and understand what is driving, maintaining and how to alleviate these symptoms in a personalised and dynamic therapeutic intervention.
Therapeutic approaches –
Multi modal compassionate inquiry
I have worked across specialist forensic, child, adolescent and adult mental health and trauma related services for persons with a broad spectrum of common mild – moderate as well as severe and complex mental health conditions, personality disorder and substance misuse dependency. My wealth and breadth of experience as a clinician, corroborated by the best available research has taught me that mental health is not fixed nor static, but exists on a continuum, ranging between good mental health – high functioning and mental ill health where functioning is less than optimum – poor. Taking this perspective, we all move up and down or sometimes find ourselves stuck at a particular point on the continuum, largely in reaction to the inevitable, unavoidable stressors of daily life and often compounded by past unresolved adverse experiences, all of which are mediated by whatever internal resources and support networks we have available.
To be effective and realise sustainable change therapy, therefore must be a joint, collaborative and compassionate process which gives primacy to the inherent importance and power of the therapeutic relationship. Inevitably because we are all shaped and conditioned by a broad diversity of life experiences everyone is therefore, unique. As such, no one size therapeutic shoe fits all, where drawing on many years of training, clinical inquiry and practice I integrate and utilise the main evidence-based treatment modalities cognitive behavioural, relational – psychodynamic and humanistic. The latter when integrated with and informed by mindful and compassionate inquiry provides a unique and radical relational framework to understand the causes of and how to ease emotional pain and suffering.