National Counsellors Day 2025

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PANEL 1

Wellbeing, Work, and Welfare

Opposing the Politics of 'Work-as-Medicine’

CHAIR: Clare Slaney

Clare Slaney is a psychotherapist, supervisor, and writer based in West London, with more than 20 years’ experience working with individuals and groups. Rooted in Person-Centred and Existential traditions, her practice is grounded in authenticity, paradox, and the continual negotiation between self and society. Alongside her clinical practice, she speaks and writes on the structural challenges facing the counselling profession, particularly the exploitation of unpaid labour and the impact of poverty on both clients and therapists.

PANEL 1 ing, Work, and Welfare: e Politics of 'Work-as-Medicine’

Exploring themes of marginalisation, power, and ethics in the counselling professions, she advocates for more honest and equitable practice. She is an Accredited Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Founder and legally qualified head lawyer and Director at Fightback4Justice, a not-for-profit community-based CIC registered under the name of Advocacy For Disabled People CIC. Michelle holds a LLB law degree with honours, a certificate of education in law and Law AS and has significant experience working in the welfare rights industry. Starting life following her degree at Citizens Advice Bureau as a law advocate in the law department, she then went on run a department at busy solicitors Adamson's law, setting up and running welfare rights department, offering probono help to those who needed it.

Michelle's has worked with disabled vulnerable people since 2013, and has gained much experience dealing with the disability benefits PIP, ESA/UC and Child and adult DLA. Along with other social welfare experience including housing and debt, she can advise on policy and the legal areas surrounding these benefits, as well as trends as she sees them on their Facebook community page, which has over 1 million hits a week and 100k followers.Website | www.fightback4justice.co.uk

PANEL 1

Wellbeing, Work, and Welfare:

Opposing the Politics of 'Work-as-Medicine’

Paul Atkinson

Paul Atkinson is a psychotherapist in independent practice in East London. He has been navigating the intersection of psychotherapy and political activism since the early 1970s, with many spells of apathy, despair and watching telly. He has chaired two psychoanalytic training organizations, helped found the Free Psychotherapy Network and the campaign for Universal Access to Counselling and Psychotherapy (uACT). He provides free openended psychotherapy at his local community centre in Poplar and is a convener of Mental Health Action. He has six grandchildren.

PANEL 2

Platformised Care in the UK What the Kaiser Strike Teaches Us About UberTherapy’s Future

CHAIR: Elizabeth Cotton

Elizabeth Cotton is a writer and educator in the field of industrial relations and mental health and is Associate Professor for Responsible Business at the University of Leicester. She is a sociologist and a Trustee of the British Sociological Association and Chair of the editorial board of Work, Employment & Society.

PANEL 1 ng, Work, and Welfare: Politics of 'Work-as-Medicine’

She has also trained and worked as a psychotherapist in the UK’s NHS and has had lots of therapy. She comes from a trade union background, working as head of education for a global union federation in the extractive industries and founded Surviving Work (www.survivingwork.org) which explores whether it’s possible to do that. She coordinates The Digital Therapy Project (www.thedigitaltherapy project.org) with researchers and practitioners looking at the impact of digitalization and platformization on therapeutic labour and on our states of mind.

Her new book UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health is published in October 2025 by Bristol University Press.

UberTherapy pre-order link | https://bristoluniversitypress co uk/ubertherapy

PANEL 2

Garie Connell, LCSW

Garie Connell, LCSW, is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker serving as a Medical Social Worker in Pediatrics and High Risk Infant Follow-Up at Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills Hospital in Southern California She is a current member and former union steward of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which recently secured a historic four-year contract with Kaiser following a six-month unfair labor practice strike. In addition to her hospital work, Garie maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Encino, California, and is a prospective psychoanalytic candidate with the Psychoanalytic Center of California beginning in Fall 2025 | Website | https://gariepoppins.medium.com

Linda Michaels

PANEL 1 ng, Work, and Welfare: Politics of

'Work-as-Medicine’

Linda Michaels, PsyD, MBA is a psychologist with a private practice in Chicago. She is Chair and CoFounder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), a grassroots nonprofit organization that advocates for improved access and awareness of psychotherapy. She is a Consulting Editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Clinical Associate Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and a fellow of the Lauder Institute Global MBA program.

SheistheauthorandeditorofthebookAdvancingPsychotherapyforthe NextGeneration,andhaspublished,presented,andbeeninterviewedbythe NewYorkTimes,WallSt.Journal,NPRamongothersonthevalueof psychotherapy,thetherapeuticrelationship,andtechnology.Lindahasa formercareerinbusiness,withover15years’experienceconsultingto organizationsintheUSandLatinAmerica

BookLink|AdvancingPsychotherapyfortheNextGenerationHumanizing MentalHealthPolicyandPractice

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From Wage Theft to Food Banks Confronting Therapist Exploitation

CHAIR: Victoria Childs

Victoria Childs is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with over thirty years experience in private practice in central London. She is involved in several psychotherapy organisations and in 2015 was a founder member of PCU, the first trade union for psychotherapists and counsellors. In 2023 she founded, with others, the Working Class Psychotherapists Association (WCPA).

PANEL 1

Work, and Welfare: Opposing the Politics of 'Work-as-Medicine’

For over twenty years she has also produced films, programmed and chaired events on psychoanalytic topics. She has written and presented material to promote debate around the interface between psychoanalysis and politics, with a particular interest in class politics and the history of critical psychiatry

PANEL 3

Rebecca Esho Greenslade

Rebecca Esho Greenslade (she/her) is an existential-feminist psychotherapist, supervisor and educator. Her therapeutic experience ranges from working in schools, palliative care and with the Psychosis Therapy Project, alongside an independent practice. In 2018, Rebecca founded Gaia Therapy Project – a community therapy project at Hackney City Farm in East London, which has now transitioned to Gaia Therapy Collective. She is the founder of the Feminist Therapy Networka community for therapeutic practitioners interested in feminist perspectives and praxis within the psy-disciplines. Her writings explore the interstices between psychotherapy, critical phenomenology, spiritual activism and liberatory feminisms; publications include: The Clinician As Killjoy (Without Killing Joy) (2025), The Other of a Feminist Praxis of Empathy (2020) and Existential Psychotherapy and the Therapeutics of Activism (2018) Rebecca is currently undertaking PhD research with the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London that considers how a spiritualised feminist therapeutics can intervene in contemporary modes of alienation. She is a Zen practitioner in the White Plum lineage and Zen Buddhist chaplain.

PANEL 1

Wellbeing, Work, and Welfare:

Opposing the Politics of 'Work-as-Medicine’

Matthew Pronger, MSc, MBACP

Psychotherapy and Counselling Union, Branch Secretary forThe North and Midlands

Mat Pronger is a private practitioner based in Sheffield, SouthYorkshire. He has worked in schools, universities and charities, with adults and young people. Mat is a branch secretary in the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union, and enjoys the community and power that comes when groups of therapists team up.

Prior to being a counsellor, Mat worked as a teaching assistant and care worker, and spent two years working in North Eastern Japan Mat also works as a musician and has a troubling taste in music

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PANEL 1 being, Work, and Welfare: the s-Medicine’

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