Profile

I live in Birmingham although my family live all over the UK. I have a pet cat named Monty who likes to pretend he is a dog by chasing sticks and having belly rubs! I enjoy walking and swimming, but my main hobbies are creative – origami and embroidery are my newest projects.  I like to watch comedy and crime-related TV series and movies, although the Harry Potter books and films are my favourite!

I work two days per week in a prison in Birmingham. I lead the psychology service within the Mental Health Team. This means that we work with doctors and nurses to support prisoners who struggle with their mental health. This can include feeling depressed or anxious, seeing or believing things that aren’t real (psychosis), or having serious problems in their relationships with other people (personality disorder). We offer them talking therapy to find out what has happened in their lives, as well as offering them different ways to think, feel and behave so that they can cope with their current situation a bit better.

My other two days per week are in a secure hospital in Birmingham. This is where people come for mental health treatment when they are not safe or well enough to stay in prison. We offer more in-depth therapy here, including individual talking therapy and groups. We try to help people recover from their mental illness and build a meaningful life. I work with a range of other people here, including doctors, nurses, Occupational Therapists and Social Workers.

I can’t put up any pictures of where I work because of security reasons; however the prison is very big (about 900 prisoners live there) and the hospital is much like a general hospital but with less beeping machines!

An important part of my job is helping people to figure out who they are and what matters to them in life. I try to treat everybody like an individual human being, regardless of any bad things that they have done. This can be tricky at times, but it is also really rewarding to get to know the person sat in front of you, and not simply judge them based on their mistakes. We often do nice activities like playing scrabble; talking about our pets; going for walks in the hospital garden; and having a party at Christmas time!

My role usually includes:

• Reading and writing emails and communicating with other people that I work with.
• Seeing patients at the hospital and prison for clinical sessions (this is where I sit with the person individually and we talk through their problems and how to solve these using psychology techniques). Sometimes I also run therapy groups with approximately 6 patients at a time. This can help them to learn from each other.
• Supervising junior staff – I help members of my team learn new skills and figure out how to deal with some of the upsetting things that they hear.
• Getting supervision from my boss – I get help to learn new skills and deal with the upsetting things that I hear!
• Training other staff – I help other professionals (e.g. doctors and nurses) to learn how to think about things from a Psychology point of view. This can be understanding what a patient’s life has been like, and how to work with someone that has a lot of challenging behaviours or is very unwell.
• Doing research and service evaluations – I like to make sure that I am doing the best job I can and so I like to evaluate the work that myself and my team are doing. I like to check the research to make sure that we are following the evidence of what works for our patients too. I don’t get loads of time for doing my own research but I do enjoy collecting data and analysing it to find the answers to interesting questions so I am always on the look out for research opportunities!