Speaking, Teaching and Training

I am an accomplished communicator, teacher, trainer and public speaker, and consistently receive very good feedback from students, trainees and audiences. I have taught, trained and spoken all over world, including keynote addresses to major academic conferences and addresses for the general public, as well as training hundreds of teams and individuals.

Expertise

Mentalizing

My book, co-authored with Prof Carla Sharp, “Mentalizing in Psychotherapy: a guide for Practitioners” (Guilford/Routledge 2022), is described by Prof Peter Fonagy as… “undoubtedly the most clearly written and most easily accessible depiction of MBT that is available to date.” I am known as someone who can explain these ideas in approachable practical ways for audiences at all levels of expertise in ths field, including none at all.

AMBIT

I co-founded AMBIT with my long term collaborator Peter Fuggle to improve help for the most excluded and oppressed populations, whose needs are always multiple and intersecting, and whose past experience of most forms of help has frequently been at best disappointing and at worst traumatic. AMBIT advocates directing mentalizing efforts in four directions (client, team, networks and learning) and I have co-authored two books on AMBIT (Oxford University Press) and numerous peer reviewed papers and chapters in other books.

Clinical work and Academic

I also teach regularly on the subject of Adolescence, and Substance Use Disorders in young people - which has been at the heart of my continuing NHS practice for more than twenty years - as well as Self-injurious Behaviours. For many years running I have taught UCL/Anna Freud Masters students on the subject of psychiatric Diagnosis and the Psychoses.

All of my work relates to Evidence-Based Practice, and especially in helping to elucidate what people actually mean by that innocuous phrase. The second edition of ”What Works for Whom: a critical review of treatments for children and adolescents” (2014, Guilford) which I co-authored with Peter Fonagy, David Cottrell, Danya Glaser, Jeanette Phillips and Elizabeth Allison, is still referred to as “the standard reference in the field.” For that book I wrote brand new chapters on Substance Use Disorders and the range of Self-Injurious Behaviours.

As one of the Co-leads for Mental Health in the project team that is developing the Cambridge Children’s Hospital (the first regional specialist children’s hospital in the East of England, aspiring to be the first in the world to fully integrate physical and mental health care at every level and across every division of the hospital, I also have much to say about working in large organisations, and largescale integrative programmes.

Contact me to discuss

Poetry

As a published poet who writes about life on a narrowboat, love, loss, wild places and more, I have begun performing my work to live audiences. A section of this website shares a selection of this work.