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Disability Psychotherapy Ireland 

in conjunction with 

Callan Institute, St. John of God Community Services clg. 

and  

UCD Centre for Disability Studies, University College Dublin

Date:               Friday 13th December '24

Time:               9.30 am – 5.00 pm 

CPD:                 6 CPD Credits

Venue:             The Beech & Birch Suite                                         

                         University College Dublin (UCD)     

                          and  online                                               

Cost:                €80

                         Light refreshments provided. 

                         Lunch not provided.

This conference is both in person (UCD) and online.                         

Guest Speakers Experts in the Field of Disability Psychotherapy:

Noelle Blackman, Tamsin Cottis,  Mark Linington, 

Eimir McGrath & Valerie Sinason

This conference is for all who work in the field or have an interest in

Disability Psychotherapy, focusing primarily on intellectual disability.

You are invited to join us for a day of exploration, discovery and reflection

on the practice of and advances in Disability Psychotherapy.

    Enquiries: callan@sjog.ie

What’s Love ♥️ got to do with it?

Programme: Speakers' Abstracts and Biographies

Dr. Noelle Blackman                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Families of people with learning disabilities and trauma.

Families who have children and adults who have a learning disability and/or are
autistic, face additional emotional and practical challenges in comparison to families of
typically developing children.
There is overwhelming evidence that these multiple challenges are associated with repeated
and enduring experiences of stress and distress for family members.
This presentation is based on a report on clinical summaries and discussions corresponding
to six cases of families that were seen in a specialist family service.
The report aims to explore the locus and nature of traumatogenic experiences reported by
families, who have a family member with a learning disability and/or are autistic. Moreover,
the report explores in more detail what has exacerbated or ameliorated the effects of
trauma on a small cohort of families in psychotherapy treatment. The families were referred
for psychotherapy because they were identified as experiencing trauma in connection their
family member with learning disabilities or autism. All of the family members involved in
this study have consented to the information shared within this paper. No information that
could lead to identifying any of the families that received treatment has been included in
this report.


Dr Noelle Blackman is an allied health professional and trained clinical supervisor, member
of the British Association of Drama therapists, a founder member of the Institute of
Psychotherapy and Disability (UK) and former CEO of national charity Respond. She is a
registered Drama-therapist and holds a PhD which researched the understanding of the
bereavement experience of people with learning disabilities through psychotherapy. In 1997
she founded a unique NHS bereavement therapy service for people with learning disabilities
which coincided with the closure of long stay hospitals. She is also the co-founder of the
National Network for the Palliative Care of People with Learning Disabilities. For twenty
years she co-facilitated a user involvement group of older people with learning disabilities
which began as part of the GOLD research project for the Foundation for People with
Learning Disabilities. She has lectured at many universities including UCL, UEL, Anglia Ruskin
University and the University of Hertfordshire. She has presented papers nationally and
internationally and her published work includes the books Loss and Learning
Disability and Caring for People with Learning Disabilities who are Dying along with chapters
in the journals Intellectual Disability, Psychotherapy and Trauma, Supervision of
Dramatherapy and Understanding and Working with People with Learning Disabilities who
Self-injure.

Tamsin Cottis

Throughlines and Connections: Child Psychotherapy, Learning Disability, Creativity and
Social Justice

In this talk I will explore the ways in which the development and practice of psychotherapy
with people with learning disabilities has informed and shaped my current practice as an
integrative psychotherapist working with children and young people.
Many of my current clients lead extremely difficult lives – economically and emotionally.
This can be highly disruptive to their education and learning, and a high proportion are
identified as having Special Education Needs (SEND) due to their social, emotional or mental
health (SEMH) needs.
I will identify how the long-term, systemic devaluing of learning disabled lives is connected
to widespread structural inequalities in relation to disability, race, class, faith and gender.
Drawing on clinical material, I will argue that the psychotherapy profession is well placed, to
both demonstrate, and advocate for, the idea that all of us are equal humans who become
who we are through relationship. As therapists we work from a place of listening, respect,
empathy and compassion. The work is underpinned by an understanding that humans are
complex, and sometimes contradictory, capable of hate and hurt, as well as love and care.
This can, at times, feel counter-cultural: we do our work in the context of highly-capitalised,
increasingly polarised societies in which difficult aspects of the self can be easily disavowed
or projected into others.
I will argue that it is more important than ever that we persist in working with relationship
at the heart of what we do, and support our co-workers in doing the same, as we seek to
foster individual capacities to love, and be loved, in return.

Tamsin Cottis is a UKCP- registered Child Psychotherapist. She is a co-founder and former
Assistant Director of Respond, the UK’s leading provider of psychotherapeutic support to
children and adults with learning disabilities. Formerly Consultant Clinical Supervisor at
Respond and a teacher at the Bowlby Centre, she is a founder member of the Institute of
Psychotherapy and Disability.
Tamsin works as a Child Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor in London primary schools,
in private practice and for a number of voluntary sector organisations.
Tamsin has presented her work to a range of national and international audiences and has
written widely for books and professional journals. Her most recent book is ‘How it Feels to
be You: Objects, play and child psychotherapy, (Karnac 2021). Tamsin is also a published
poet and prize-winning author of short fiction and memoir.

Mark Linington

Being Loved and Loving Others: An Attachment-based Perspective

This presentation will explore the experience of love in the life of a person with an
intellectual disability and ways in which this can be understood from an attachment-based
psychoanalytic perspective, using an attachment model developed from the work of John
Bowlby by Una McCluskey, Dorothy Heard and Brian Lake.

Mark Linington is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and child
psychotherapist (UKCP reg.). He trained with The Bowlby Centre, where he is the Chair of
the Executive Committee, a training therapist and a training supervisor.
He worked for 12 years in the NHS as a psychotherapist with people with intellectual
disabilities who have experienced trauma and abuse.
He currently works as a consultant psychotherapist and supervisor with the Clinic for
Dissociative Studies, at a secondary school in London for young people with complex special
needs, and in private practice with children, families and adults.

Dr. Eimir McGrath

Therapy in an elevator. Loving intersubjectivity as the therapeutic frame in Disability
Psychotherapy.

The containment of therapy is held within the relationship, this is the essence of the
therapeutic frame that doesn’t necessarily require the physical boundary of a therapy room.
This concept is explored through a clinical case study of a disabled child’s search for
autonomy and empowerment through loving connection with self and others, which took us
outside the therapy room. The child’s many experiences of the world from a position of
helpless and compliant bystander were reframed through therapeutic journeys in an
elevator, with lovingly attuned passengers.

Dr. Eimir McGrath is a Psychotherapist and Play Therapist who specialises in attachment, complex trauma and dissociative disorders. She works with both children and adults with and without disabilities and is a founder member and Chair of Disability Psychotherapy Ireland (DPI), a founder member of the Irish Association of Play Therapy and Psychotherapy (IAPTP),  and Secretary of the Institute of Psychotherapy and Disability, (IPD, UK). She is Chair Elect of the Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Special Interest Group of the ISSTD (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation). 

 As Co-Director of the Relate Ability Centre, she provides psychotherapy, supervision and consultancy to various agencies and services throughout Ireland. Eimir is also a researcher in several disciplines including  psychotherapy, play therapy, critical disability studies, and dance. She has contributed to books and clinical journals in these disciplines and lectures and provides training both nationally and internationally.

Dr Valerie Sinason

The Advanced Words : Love and Understanding

A mother in a South African township, with a son with profound multiple disabilities, grabbed my arm in excitement. For the first time in years, she, and other mothers who had to leave their children all day to gain work in white areas, had some joyful news to impart. One carer, a grandmother, would stay in a large shack all day to be with thirty children. There was water and basic food and minimal objects to play with. But the children all beamed. They had a carer just for them who would stay with them all day. Before they had been left, often tied up, with no-one willing to look after them and their single mothers were left with terrible choices. The change in the children was remarkable. The carer had also made holes in cardboard boxes so children with multiple disabilities would not be left lying on the floor but could look around them. This was due to Love, attachment, what nature has given us as our oldest gift but also our most advanced. 

Our poor crippled social care and health services in lucky countries, let alone unlucky ones, could be transformed by this. Love and therapeutic understanding make an unbeatable combination. As a young woman in a famine area said to me, "Without therapeutic thinking I would feel too guilty to eat". So let us nourish ourselves so that we can offer the truly old and young, advanced and prehistoric, inbuilt and intrinsic love and understanding. Clinical examples will be given to illustrate such transformations.

Dr Valerie Sinason is a widely published poet, writer, child, and adolescent Psychoanalytic psychotherapist (retired) and adult psychoanalyst. She has specialised in trauma and disability for forty years and lectures nationally and internationally. Founder and now Patron
for the Clinic for Dissociative Studies UK, she is also proud to be President of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability. She is also on the Board of the ISSTD and received their 2017 lifetime Achievement Award and the British Psychoanalytic Council Innovation Excellence
Award 2022

Dr Christine Linehan: Welcome

Dr Christine Linehan, Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the UCD School of Psychology, Director of the UCD Centre for Disability Studies and Joint Director of the MSc in Disability. Christine Linehan PhD: Christine’s area of research is disability with a focus on deinstitutionalisation and community living, health inequalities and neuroepidemiology. Christine is Secretary to the Board of St. Margaret’s IRL IASD, an organisation supporting individuals with disabilities. Christine serves on a number of committees with IASSIDD, the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and ILAE, the International League against Epilepsy.

Dr Rosemary Gowran: Opening Address

Dr Rosie Gowran Associate Professor in Occupational Therapy, School of Allied Health, University of Limerick. Clinical Lead for the National Clinical Programme for People with Disability with the Health Service Executive in Ireland; Honorary Professor with the Global Disability Innovation Hub, University College London. Board of Directors International Society of Wheelchair Professionals (ISWP).

Dr. Barry O’Donnell: Morning Session Respondent

Dr. Barry O'Donnell is Director of Psychotherapy Programmes in the School of Medicine in UCD. He is Director of The School of Psychotherapy in St. Vincent's University Hospital. He practices psychoanalysis, provides clinical supervision and publishes regularly in the psychoanalytic field. He is committed to building the presence of of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Irish culture and encourages dialogue between the different modalities of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as well as between these fields and other disciplines such as psychiatry, general practice, nursing and social work

Dr. Brendan McCormack: Afternoon Session Respondent; Chair, Roundtable

Consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, specialising in working with people with Intellectual Disability. Recently retired from clinical management roles in HSE Mental Health services and Cheeverstown House Services for people with Intellectual Disability. Former member of National Steering Group for Mental Health and Intellectual Disability, and various Clinical Advisory Groups including the Talking Therapies, Self Harm, Gender Identity, and Obesity National Clinical Programmes. Former member of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability in the UK and current member of Disability Psychotherapy Ireland.