Who is Healthy Mind Psychology?
Healthy Mind Psychology aims to be a trusted, safe home for support and information regarding the holistic wellbeing of our clients and colleagues. We are a practice of over 10 doctoral-level Psychologists and a team of associated partners who are professionals in other fields that are relevant to emotional and physical wellbeing. We focus on offering high-quality education and emotional skill-development to both normalise and empower all people struggling in a world filled with stress and challenge. The Psychologists support clients through online or face-to-face therapy in four main areas of clinical specialty: Clinical Psychology, Neuropsychology, Pain Management, and Health Psychology. Moving beyond traditional medical models, the Psychologists aim to help people understand the often-misunderstood links between emotion state, thought content, previous experiences and physical body responses. This helps clients make sense and take control of their emotional functioning, as well as any physical conditions and medical symptoms (including those without formal diagnoses). But we do not work in silo. By linking Psychologists and other practitioners in healthcare or the well-being sector, we can help curate personalised approaches for full mind-body programs towards greater wellbeing!
Our Mission & Values
The mission of Healthy Mind Psychology is to offer the highest standard of Psychological therapy and treatment while offering a safe and connected space accessible anywhere throughout the country. The mission goes further, though, to highlight modern understandings within the scientific literature of a new model of healthcare highlighting the psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology (PNI) system. This model, though a mouthful, recognises the role of the entire body system in wellbeing- and that each piece of this system is connected to all others (where traditional medical models prefer to isolate the systems or treat diseases in isolation). The PNI theory explains how our thoughts/emotions, the neurophysiology of the brain connections with the body, the immune system functioning, and the hormone system all are constantly communicating and interacting with each other in a dance where influence in one area impacts all of the others. Our Psychologists work with clients to pull apart the understanding of the psychological contributions to the neurophysiological systems (especially the role of the Stress Response), and how that influences all systems further creating a host of symptoms/dysfunction including mood, energy levels, pain, sleep, weight, and even disease processes!
With new understanding of these complex processes, work can then begin to offer strategies or support developing a personalised understanding of how to optimise these functions or interrupt negative feedback cycles. Our aim is to be partners with our clients to make our clients the experts of their own wellbeing. By providing a safe environment for both sharing and learning, we encourage our clients on a journey of discovering and optimising their own interactions between their mental and physical. The client then can feel empowered to make optimal lifestyle changes or choices that focuses on value-driven existences with greater wellbeing.
Our Treatment Models:
Tools and therapies from Clinical Psychology, Neuropsychology, and Health Psychology inform our treatment approaches with techniques from the following therapy models:
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Schema Therapy
Psychodynamic Therapy
EMDR
Trauma-Informed treatment
Mindfulness Based therapy
Compassion Focused Therapy
Motivational Interviewing
Solution-Focused Treatment
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy
Positive Behaviour Support
Others…
The Neuropsychologists in our group work specially with the cognitive assessment and rehabilitation treatment of people with Acquired Brain Injuries and are available for this support individually or as part of teams instructed by solicitors or case managers. However, all the clinicians aim to help clients understand the neurological mechanisms in play across everyone’s functioning, not just those with brain injury. For the general population, we introduce concepts of the Stress Response, Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems, Polyvagal Theory, and the role of the HPA-axis and the limbic system in general learning or trauma to enhance therapeutic motivation and understanding.
Our Speciality Services:
A current area of development is the specialist focus on supporting Psychologists new to the independent sector. Healthy Mind Psychology has a special program for onboarding new Psychology Associates who are interested in our mission but need support making the leap with setting up their own practices or letting go of long-term work with other institutions. We are always looking for like-minded professionals to join our team, so we welcome enquiries from professionals wanting to explore associate or partnership opportunities.
What Makes HMP stand-out business within the Social Care sector?
Healthy Mind Psychology is trying to change the narrative around the role of psychology within traditional medical practice. This focus is both within a reactive but also a preventative approach to the link between emotional well-being and physical health. Sometimes the battle is to engage both clients and referral sources in seeing the value of psychological support in traditional medical treatments, without the threatening and invalidating labels of symptoms being “in the head” or unreal. Clients want answers to their suffering, and sometimes when medical causes are not clear or sufficiently explanatory, our approach can offer empirically supported, neurophysiological explanations for why symptoms persist and what can be tried next.
It is our mission also to create a practice of network and connection within the independent sector. We want the clients to have a multi-disciplinary team of other like-minded professionals with independent specialties to explore all the other areas of our mind-body model. We fundamentally believe that Psychology service cannot be successful in silo. Therefore, our goal of connection is highlighted within the clients’ personal worlds but also between and among our professional colleagues wanting camaraderie and a team experience within the private space.
The Biggest Challenges Facing HMP Right Now:
We are aiming to increase awareness of the basic tenets of our philosophy in the upcoming year. We want people to understand that the stress response is real and impacts everyone, the traditional medical model of disease is changing, and that psychology tools for emotion regulation should have been taught to everyone in school (yet never were)! These messages will hopefully turn the tide to help people feel validated in their struggles to gain support within healthcare but also not shy away from the value of engaging in Psychological therapy – to maximise emotional functioning without fear of negative labels, as it will have impact across all of the body and lifespan also!
To overcome the challenges of outdated medical narrative and public scepticism, we aim to push our communications across six specific messages:
1. The current medical narrative- why it’s outdated at best, harmful at worst!
2. The physiology of thoughts and emotions- the physically measurable response of the body to intangible thoughts and feelings (and how to make sense of this mind/body nexus)
3. The stress response- how our subconscious protective system both saves us and derails us, and the consequences of a system gone awry
4. Psychology for everybody- why there is no hierarchy of deserving access to information and tools from a science everyone should benefit from
5. Finding well-being in a world with warts- accepting what we have, warts and all, is a secret to getting more of what we want, and clarity of what we have the ability to change
6. The shape of our past- our past experiences give us the lenses with which we view our current world, which is why we often need to go back to move forward
We will be focusing on expanding upon these six themes over the course of the next year across our website and social media platforms. Watch this space!
HMP’s Greatest Achievement So far…
This service has been a particularly fast-growing practice within the last 12 months and is now on the road to engaging a greater audience to pass on information and awareness of our mission. We have grown from a team of 4 to 12 doctoral-level psychologists this year and have formed a network of other professionals to link with so that clients have access to trusted colleagues in many disciplines of support with which they can explore. But we are always looking for more! Connection is the name of our game. If our mission and the ideas reviewed hear align with your interests or values, get in touch! We are available to work with you as a therapist, a mentor, a colleague, or a partner, and we always look forward to making another valuable connection.