Deborah is an Emotional Health Practitioner, passionate about helping children, young people, and adults maintain and recover their psychosocial well-being. Deborah actively promotes safeguarding practices, best practice principles, and is interested in evidence-based clinical responses to acute and chronic mental ill-health across the lifespan: infant, child, and adult traumatology. Deborah receives regular supervision-on-supervision for complex matters and her training in clinical supervision has included supervising teams of practitioners in family and relationship services, supervising teams working in family mediation (face-to-face & online services) and community and forensic mental health practitioners working in the mental health sector.

Deborah is also a trained child consultant with experience in post-separation children’s counselling having worked across several family law environments. Her therapeutic approaches range from the humanistic, psychodynamic, emotion-focused, experiential and expressive arts therapies, including child-parent psychotherapy. Deborah specializes in mentalisation-based therapy (MBT), and she has published in the American Psychology Association on the topic of child psychotherapy, childhood trauma, and recovery. She has also published in the Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia (PACJA) on mentalisation-based treatment for rumination disorder in the context of friendship dissolution and is active in peer review processes in the social science research field.

In addition to advanced mental health intervention skills, child and adult psychotherapeutic intervention, including psychodynamic case formulation, one of Deborah’s key strengths is networking with various stakeholders—parents and primary caregivers, engaging with housing and tenancy agencies, mental health services, primary health services, school communities, child safety officers, domestic violence agencies including court, family law, and forensic and criminal justice personnel.