We normally have 10 events per year running from September. The NWRPA does not meet in January or August. You can join at any time your membership entitles you to attend all events for a year from the date you join. Please see Membership page for details. All events are held on the second Monday of the month commencing at 19:00 BST/GMT. Events typically last for 60 to 90 minutes and are followed by a networking meeting for Members.
Our programme of events for 2024-25 is taking shape, although later Events have yet to be finalised. If you would like to make a presentation, or give a talk on a topic of interest to our membership, please contact the Association secretary Mr Frank Kelley.
September 2023 – Relationships with food and how they can branch into disordered eating
Dr Samantha Brooks
Monday 11 September 2023, 7.00pm – 8.00pm BST
Dr. Samantha Brooks is a Reader of Cognitive Neuroscience in the School of Psychology, Faculty of Health, Liverpool John Moores University, UK, and a Chartered member of the British Psychological Society. Her research specialises in the neural mechanisms of impulse control in various psychiatric conditions e.g. addiction and eating disorders.
Eating disorders are diagnosed in 1-10% of people worldwide and include formal diagnoses of anorexia nervosa (extreme attempts to restrict food intake), bulimia nervosa (intermittent binge eating and restriction) and binge eating disorder (lack of food intake restriction). In 2022 the Royal College of Psychiatrists reported that eating disorder admission rates in the UK continue to rise to a current high of 84%, which is alarming as NHS services are overcrowded, understaffed and financially at breaking point post-Covid. A similar pattern is observed in other Westernised countries. In otherwise healthy individuals without a formal eating disorder diagnosis, neuroscientists can also see a broad distinction in relationships with food. Some people are ‘cognitive eaters’ who are driven to eat by responding to external cues (e.g. “it is time to eat now”). Others are ‘hedonic eaters’ who are driven to eat by ‘bottom-up’ reward cues from the internal body cues (e.g. “I like how that tastes, I will eat it”). These broad relationships with food can determine whether, under cognitive stress, a person is more prone to losing or gaining weight, and to be distracted by issues surrounding food and the body.
October 2023 – The Brain Basis of Consciousness: 9th October 2023
Prof Mark Solms
Monday 9 October 2023, 7.00pm – 8.00pm BST
Perceptual imagery and language dominates our conscious experience. These functions are performed by the cerebral cortex. Understandably, for this reason, we have for the past two centuries considered the cortex (which is uniquely well developed in human beings) to be the ‘organ of consciousness’. However, as early as 1949, evidence began to emerge which suggested that consciousness is a far more primitive function and that it arises endogenously from the inner most core of the ancient brain stem. The structures that were implicated are by no means uniquely human; we share them with all vertebrates. In this talk, evidence that has accumulated over the last 20 years will be presented to support the view that consciousness is neither a uniquely human nor cortical function, and that it arises fundamentally from raw feelings (like pleasure and pain) that we share even with fishes.
Prof Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, who is known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. He holds the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital (Departments of Psychology and Neurology) and is the President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association. He is also Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association (since 2013).
Solms founded the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society in 2000 and he was a Founding Editor (with Ed Nersessian) of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. He is Director of the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is also Director of the Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation in New York, a Trustee of the Neuropsychoanalysis Fund in London, and Director of the Neuropsychoanalysis Trust in Cape Town (from Wikipedia).
Widely published, his most recent book (2021) is entitled “The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness”. Reviewing it in the Guardian, Oliver Burkeman wrote, “Nobody bewitched by [the mystery of consciousness] can afford to ignore the solution proposed by Mark Solms in The Hidden Spring.
November 2023 – Quantum Psychotherapy: Uncertainty, entanglement and spooky action at a distance
Monday 13 November 2023, 7.00 – 8.00pm GMT
Dr Alan Priest
In this talk, Alan will draw some interesting and hopefully thought-provoking parallels between quantum ideas and psychotherapy. For example, most of us probably think in terms of therapeutic practice as usually being a process of slow and gradual change, yet trauma can change a person’s world beyond recognition in the briefest instant – leading to tremendous psychological distress and a struggle for adjustment. Similarly, change in therapy can also happen rapidly, often unexpectedly, and for reasons which appear to bear no connection to anything the therapist has done, or not done. The human experience of time is far from immutable. This is arguably one definition of quantum effects – that things don’t change slowly and continuously according to a predictable process, but are capable of moving from one state to a different state in an instant.
Alan will also consider the way in which client and therapist can be seen as ‘entangled’, such that a change in one may appear to impact the other, even though they may be separated in time and space. He will also invite discussion of the role of “superposition” – the idea that all outcomes remain possible until the act of observation, invoking Schrödinger’s cat as a potential companion within the client:therapist dyad.
Be reassured: this won’t be a physics lecture, but a light-hearted exploration of nevertheless potentially useful ways of thinking about psychotherapeutic process.
No knowledge of quantum mechanics is required and we welcome you sharing your own experiences of what Albert Einstein famously once described as “spooky action at a distance!”
Dr Alan Priest is a visiting lecturer in counselling psychology and a research supervisor at City, University of London. He has held substantive posts at the University of Salford and Metanoia Institute/Middlesex University, where he was Director of Studies for Counselling Psychology and Humanistic Psychotherapy Trainings. He started his career in the NHS, working in Manchester and in Huddersfield & Calderdale. Now semi-retired after a 30 career in teaching and practice, he maintains a very small private psychotherapy practice in his home town of Huddersfield.
December 2023 – The Myth of the Untroubled Therapist: Managing our personal lives in relation to clinical work
Monday, 11 December 2023, 7– 8 PM (GMT)
Dr Marie Adams
Therapists are not immune to the range of problems their clients experience, including divorce, bereavement, illness and depression. In this talk, Marie will discuss the kinds of difficulties clinicians face, based on her research involving 40 different practitioners from varied backgrounds, practising in a range of modalities – CBT, psychoanalytic, integrative and humanistic. Marie will discuss some of what she has learned about how therapists cope during times of personal strife, acknowledging that therapists are far from immune to the kind of problems with which we assist our clients. She argues that therapists need to take a step back and consider their own wellbeing yet acknowledges some of the challenges that we face when trying to do this.
Dr Marie Adams is a writer and practising psychotherapist with a research interest in how therapists’ personal lives impact their work with clients. Until recently she was on staff at the Metanoia Institute, primarily on the doctoral programmes. She is now a visiting lecturer at a number of other training centres, including the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education in London. Before becoming a psychotherapist, Marie had a long association with the BBC, first as a news producer on the Today Programme and, more recently, as a consulting psychotherapist to news and documentary staff. Her book, The Myth of the Untroubled Therapist, is a standard text on counselling and psychotherapy training courses throughout the UK. The second edition, extensively updated to consider the impact of COVID-19 on practitioners, was published by Routledge in September 2023.
January 2024 – the NWRPA does not meet in January
February 2024 – Maternity and Madness : A psychodynamic view of perinatal mental health
Monday, February 12, 2024
Katrina Ashton
Over 10 years ago in 2013, The Guardian newspaper” identified mental illness as “one of the biggest health risks in pregnancy.” One in 10 mothers suffer from it, either before or after the birth. As counsellors and psychotherapists, we know that untreated psychological distress and mental ill-health can have devastating and far-reaching implications. The rest of the mother’s life may be affected, as can the life of her child and the lives of future generations of the family. Ten years on, Katrina provides an overview of what has sometimes been called “maternal madness” and will offer fascinating insights from a psychodynamic perspective.
Katrinas’ entry into public service was as a nurse in 1974, in Glasgow. Since then she has been working also as a midwife and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. In 2024 Katrina will have reached 50 years of service in the NHS, during which time the topic of ‘maternal madness’ has surfaced on and off both in clinical practice and familial settings and has been discussed from various different perspectives and in different contexts.
Katrina is a psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapist working both in the NHS and privately. She has also been a midwife for 40+ years, working in the NHS and now specialising in peri and post- natal mental health, meaning she is uniquely placed to provide insightful perspectives on this fascinating topic.
March 2024 – Acceptance & Commitment therapy (ACT) and Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) with long-term health conditions
Monday, March 11, 2024, 7pm GMT
Alec Bond
Within respiratory patients there can often be complex elements at play regarding their psychological wellbeing which can be a contributor to how well a respiratory condition is managed (or not, in some cases) by a patient. ACT and CFT Arguably have much to offer in psychological formulation and interventions with this patient group.
(ACT) is an empirically based psychological intervention that encourages acceptance of “what is,” employing mindfulness strategies, together with strategies to develop commitment and modify behaviour, to increase psychological flexibility. ACT also illuminates for patients the ways in which language may entangle them into futile attempts to battle against themselves and engage in self blame. It is particularly effective when combined with elements of compassion focused therapy (CFT). Research evidence provides evidence of efficacy for chronic pain and depression (Tamannaeifar et al., 2014).
This talk will provide an understanding of how ACT and CFT can be applied to the psychological assessment, formulation, and intervention with patients managing a long-term health conditions, using examples when working with patients living with respiratory illness.
Alec is a current Trainee Health Psychologist at Liverpool John Moores University and works with patients with various respiratory conditions and psychological needs at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital. Professional interests include palliative and end of life care, particularly in relation to respiratory illness, as well as health inequalities.
April 2024 – Factitious Disorders (Medical Deception)
Monday, April 8, 2024 at 7 PM (BST) * in the UK, Daylight Saving Time commences March 31 and adds one hour to GMT.
Paige Barker
Paige will present the findings from her research study “Practitioners’ Experiences and/or Knowledge of Factitious Disorders”. During the data collection, nuanced forms of Factitious Disorders and associated typologies that are not within the literature emerged. She argues that previous research is bound to a bias of Munchausen’s Syndrome and Munchausen by Proxy (the chronic form of Factitious Disorders) that misinforms society’s perception of these conditions as peculiar and rare. Her work Aims to provide an understanding of these disorders, including contexts we often overlook such as Factitious Disorders in the Profession and Factitious Disorders Online.
My presentation will provide knowledge on a contemporary theoretical model I am currently developing. Understating how Factitious Disorders present in varied contexts will convey the level of preceding research required to support current shortcomings.
Paige is a second-year PhD student in the Faculty of Health and School of Forensic Psychology at Liverpool John Moore’s University. Her research area is within Factitious Disorders involving medical deception, this being Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self and Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another.
May 2024 – Probation practitioners’ experiences of managing high risk individuals on probation within the offender personality disorder pathway
Dr. Victoria Blinkhorn
Monday 13 May 2024, 7.00pm to 8.00pm BST
Dr. Victoria Blinkhorn is a Senior Lecturer in Forensic and Investigative Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, and a chartered member of the British Psychological Society. Her research interests broadly concern how mental illnesses, personality disorders and traits help to explain offending behaviour in adults, specifically females. She also undertakes work in some areas of applied psychology and is a Research Consultant for the NHS and Probation Service, Merseyside and Cheshire.
The Department of Health and the National Offender Management Service jointly commissioned the Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) pathway in 2011. Its aims were to provide a pathway of psychologically informed services for a highly complex and challenging offender group. They are likely to have traits of personality disorder and pose a high risk of harm to others. In 2013, the OPD pathway commissioned a Psychologically Informed Consultation Service (PICS) for the Merseyside and Cheshire Probation Service. The service offers Probation Practitioners the option of accessing a consultation and a case formulation. This aids a psychological understanding of the offender and their risk; and, where appropriate, the identification of appropriate pathways, which meet the needs of the individual. The service seeks to develop a more psychologically informed workforce by providing knowledge and understanding of the bio psychosocial framework in an accessible way, thus improving the quality of the professional relationship with the offender and the management across services in custody and the community.
In this talk, Victoria will present the research she has conducted in collaboration with the NHS and Probation Service. She will also discuss what is currently in progress including future plans, all with an aim to further improve the management of high risk individuals within the OPD pathway.
Optimising perioperative language assessment in awake craniotomy: picture naming with nouns and finite verbs in the past and present tense
Dr Rhiannon Mackenzie-Phelan
Monday 10 June, 19:00 BST
Perioperative assessment of linguistic functions is crucial in awake neurosurgery for the removal of gliomas (brain tumours), both preoperatively (before surgery), intraoperatively (during surgery) and postoperatively (after surgery). Intraoperative assessment aims to map the linguistic functions of perilesional brain regions, enabling the surgeon to carefully extract the tumour without inducing severe impairments to function. Preoperative assessment serves to establish the baseline language status of the patient and the appropriateness of awake surgery. Postoperative assessment aims to monitor changes from baseline over the postoperative course to ascertain whether lasting linguistic impairments have occurred and to determine the necessity of speech and language interventions. However, current clinical language assessment administered during all three phases is limited in several ways. For intraoperative assessment, the limitations stem from the absence of a universally standardised linguistic protocol. Protocols in use vary highly between different institutions and are often developed ad-hoc with a lack of methodological rigour. For pre- and post-operative testing, while standardised measures are usually used, they have often been developed for assessing impairments in stroke aphasia, failing to capture subtler impairments emerging from recent research into the unique nature of the glioma language profile, e.g., lexical retrieval delays. The current research has sought to improve testing in glioma patients at all three surgical phases by trialling a new perioperative linguistic test battery (VAN-POP) which assesses the production of nouns and finite verbs during picture naming in sentence context. This talk will discuss the findings of implementing this new battery within an NHS neurosurgical centre, both for intraoperative language mapping, and for monitoring changes in lexical retrieval speed over the postoperative course.
Bio
Dr Rhiannon Mackenzie-Phelan is a Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). She completed her BSc. (hons) degree in Applied Psychology at LJMU in 2014, before going on to study for an MSc in Psychology Research Methods at the University of Nottingham in 2015. After being awarded an LJMU scholarship in 2016, she recently completed her PhD in Neuropsychology on the topic of language assessment in awake craniotomy for glioma (brain tumours).
Rhiannon also has broader interests in other areas of psychology and health. At present she is working on a scoping review in collaboration with colleagues in the LJMU School of Nursing to examine the barriers to disclosure of learning differences (e.g., dyslexia) among postgraduate students. She will also soon begin work as a post-doctoral researcher on a project exploring digital health inequalities amongst individuals with intellectual/developmental disabilities.
“The man who did not want counselling”
Frank Kelley
Monday July 8, 2024
For very many years until his retirement, Frank was a psychodynamic counsellor working in the NHS. In this evening’s session, he presented a case history based on a former client who was persuaded to go for counselling by his daughter, following the death of his wife. At the time Frank worked with him, Frank himself had relatively recently lost his first wife also, so there was arguably perhaps anelement of parallel process. What was interesting however was that on each of the six occasions on which Frank engaged with the client, he repeatedly said, “no” to Frank’s question, “would you like counselling?” However, at the end he said, “yes” when asked if he would like to arrange a further meeting! It was only after six sessions That the client replied “no” to this question and the therapy ended. In the talk and in discussion afterwards, we discussed the unconscious processes playing out between client and therapist, including concepts such as condensation i.e. contradicting feelings and thoughts which are experienced without any sense of conflict, as well as the idea of “acting in” when the client is “acting out”. In discussion, we made the point that unconscious motivation is crucial, yet is not always accompanied by conscious intent to engage in therapy. Highly interesting and thought-provoking session presented by an experienced practitioner.
Frank Kelly, although retired from his NHS role, continues to work hard as Secretary of the NWRPA, as he has done for very many years.