Mental health
A clinician alongside you, for the parts nobody else covers.
I started working in mental health in 2001, back when nobody was calling any of this wellbeing. 25+ years on, this is the part of my work that is still straightforwardly clinical.
Private support for known vulnerability, for a crisis, for staying well, for time spent in the UK, and for the stretch after discharge when everything formal stops.
What I offer
Private mental health support, five ways.
This is not therapy and it is not a replacement for a treating team. It is a clinician alongside you - for the bits that fall between services, or outside them entirely.
Known vulnerability
For people who already understand their own pattern - a diagnosis, a history, something that has come back before - and want somebody clinical alongside them who knows it too, rather than explaining it from scratch every time.
Help in a crisis
When something has gone wrong and it needs a person who has seen it before and will not panic. Fast, private, and without the machinery that usually comes attached.
Staying well
The ongoing work of self-care and wellness for people whose lives make it genuinely difficult - travel, scrutiny, pressure, no routine. Staying well is a practice, not a decision.
Support while visiting the UK
For people who live elsewhere and need continuity of support while they are here. Their own clinicians remain their own clinicians; this sits alongside.
Recovery after discharge
The period after inpatient or intensive treatment, when formal support drops away and the return to ordinary life is the hardest part of it.
This is not an emergency or out-of-hours service. If you need urgent help, call 999, or the Samaritans on 116 123 - free, 24 hours, from any phone in the UK.
The training
Qualified, and then kept going.
I qualified as a Registered Mental Health Nurse with a BSc in Mental Health Nursing, and went on to an MSc in Occupational Psychology - the combination that lets me sit with an individual and read an organisation, rather than only one of the two.
Since then I have trained across nine therapeutic and coaching modalities. Not to collect them. Because no single one of them fits every person who sits down in front of you.
- CBTCognitive Behavioural Therapy
- DBTDialectical Behaviour Therapy
- ACTAcceptance and Commitment Therapy
- MBTMentalisation-Based Therapy
- CFTCompassion-Focused Therapy
- SFTSolution-Focused Therapy
- MindfulnessMindfulness-based approaches
- NLPNeuro-Linguistic Programming
- CBT coachingCognitive Behavioural coaching
The settings
Where those years were actually spent.
These are the places that teach you what a person looks like when things are genuinely bad, and what actually helps. It is the reason very little surprises me now, and the reason I do not flinch when someone tells me the real version.
- Community mental health
- Crisis
- Psychiatric liaison
- Anxiety, personality disorder and depression services
- Drug and alcohol
- Dementia and older adults
- PICU
- Forensic settings
- Child and adolescent
I do occasionally work with teenagers, but usually by referral only, and in a coaching capacity rather than a clinical one.
How I work
I am not a therapist, and I do not want to be.
There is no named system here, no acronym, no framework I will sell you. That is deliberate. The whole point is that I adapt to the person in front of me rather than running everybody through the same process - and a branded method would be the opposite of that claim.
What I actually do is ask a particular kind of question and then wait for the answer. Tell me about your life and I will tell you how you think, and in turn why you feel and behave the way you do. Not labels, not diagnoses. The human condition, properly looked at.
Most people are not nearly as complicated as their diagnosis suggests, once you take the label off.
Now
What it gets used for.
These days the clinical work sits underneath three businesses rather than on a ward. It is what makes the coaching more than encouragement, what makes the training evidence-based rather than motivational, and what made me confident that introducing people properly was a mental health question in the first place.