Therapeutic Relationships in Mental Health Settings

Everyone working in mental health knows how emotionally taxing that work can be. There’s something fundamentally different to working in physical medicine. We’re not dealing with patients who “have” an illness, but with people whose difficulties are central to their personality, their emotional experience and their ways of relating. In working with them, we get deeply affected and we might get embroiled in ways that make things worse. Relationships are central to the work. If we understand what happens between our patients and us, in ourselves, and between staff, we can be of much more help to them. Psycho-analysis offers such ways of understanding, and this is what this course aims to do.

Jacqueline Bristow

Jacqueline Bristow is a Psychoanalyst, member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and Co-Head of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. Her background is as a Psychiatrist, and she has worked for many years in community and hospital NHS mental health settings. She has an interest in the use of psychoanalytic thinking in reflective practice, and Balint groups.

John Wright

John Wright is a psychoanalyst who originally trained as a clinical psychologist in the north of England, and then as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic London. He has over 30 years experience in NHS community mental health and inpatient settings, and is currently working in NHS in Plymouth and in private practice in Devon.

Marcus Evans

Marcus trained as a mental health nurse. He became interested in understanding what psychiatric patients communicate and turned to psychoanalysis for that. He trained as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and later as a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. He has – quite uniquely - managed to bridge mental health nursing and psychoanalysis: He was the Head of the Nursing Discipline at the Tavistock Clinic for 20 years and for a while an Associate Clinical Director there. He was one of the founders of the Tavistock’s Fitzjohn’s Service for the treatment of patients with severe personality disorder. He has designed and taught courses for front line staff in different settings for the last 25 years and has extensive experience of offering supervision and reflective practice to staff teams in mental health settings. He’s published two books: ‘Making Room for Madness in Mental Health: the psychoanalytic understanding of psychotic communications’, and now – it’s just come out last week - “Psychoanalytic Thinking in Mental Health Settings.”

Joan Osimuwa

Joan is an impatient Matron at Lambeth Hospital. She has worked in different mental health settings, on inpatient wards and in community mental health teams and has been the ward manager of female psychiatric wards. She is now a Practice Experience Manager, working with universities to provide placements for students and support them and she trains clinical staff to become practice assessors and supervisors. 

Siobhan Bryant

Siobhan is trained both as a general and a mental health nurse. She worked at the Cassel Hospital, in a therapeutic community, with adults and adolescents with personality disorder. For the last ten years she has worked in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, as a senior nurse and psychodynamic counsellor, working with young people in schools and the community, with university students and with teachers.

29th September - Therapeutic relationships

6th October - Understanding borderline states of mind

13th October - Tuning in to psychotic states of mind

20th October - Assessment of suicidal risk

3rd November - Working with Adolescence - struggling with the turmoil of Adolescence.

10th November - Working with eating disorder – the silent assassin.

17th November - Working with deliberate self-harm – working on a knife edge.

24th November - Anti-social personality disorder – actions speak louder than words.

Please note: This event will be recorded and available for the following 48 hours to all registered participants. This is to allow international attendees to enjoy the event at a more appropriate time in their time zone. After this time, the recording will no longer be available. 

REFUND POLICY: Tickets are fully refundable until 14 days before the lecture, after which time no refunds will be issued. 

Views and opinions expressed by speakers are their own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Institute, event organisers or other speakers. We expect delegates to respect the confidentiality of clinical material discussed in our events. The content must not be recorded, conveyed or disseminated in any format and participants must not share access to the event with non-registered participants.