Dr Fabienne Palmer

How I came to this work

I have been paying close attention to public life for a long time, from well before social media made visibility a common condition. I have watched what it makes possible, what it costs, and the peculiar arithmetic of being lifted up and pulled down, often by the same audience. Meeting challenge again and again in that context is not a failure of the person. It is the ordinary condition of a life lived with ambition and integrity. What repetition has taught me is that being knocked and getting up is the practice, not the exception. It is what I now help my clients do with more skill, less cost, and greater confidence.

How I trained

I hold a First-Class BSc (Hons) in Psychology, a Postgraduate Certificate in Evidence-Based Psychological Treatment with Merit, and a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. I am a Chartered Clinical Psychologist, HCPC registered and a Chartered member of the British Psychological Society. My clinical career spans over a decade in specialist NHS services and private practice. I have trained across multiple therapeutic modalities, including EMDR, schema-informed, systemic, narrative and liberation-oriented approaches, because no single framework holds every person, and because rigour requires more than one toolkit. I keep training, supervising and being supervised, and I hold myself to the same standards I ask of my clients. It is the standard the work deserves.

Both my undergraduate and doctoral research went beyond the individual. My undergraduate examined how sensationalised media coverage narrows attention and reinforces stereotype, so I was studying the psychology of audience effect long before it became everyone’s daily reality. My doctoral thesis was data-led and policy-oriented, focused on service and system change. Alongside clinical work, I have led on the design, evaluation and improvement of new services, shaped team cultures, and supported leaders through organisational change. Between the research and the practice, I think fluently at the level of the person and at the level of the system around them.

A fuller record of my employment history is available on LinkedIn.

How this shows up in the work

All of the training and research adds up to a specific way of practising. I do not treat difficulty as if it lives only inside a person. My social psychology training at Kent gave me a rigorous grounding in how attention, stereotype, group dynamics and media shape thought, and my clinical training taught me how to work with those forces alongside the individual mind. That combination means the frameworks I draw on, including narrative, systemic and social-constructionist ones, take seriously the world around a client, not only the world within them.

For you, what that looks like in session is straightforward. You will get a clear formulation, agreed between us, of what is happening in your specific life and your specific context. You will get evidence-based interventions chosen for you, not for the average person. You will get progress that is tracked where measurement is useful, and thought about deliberately where it is not. And you will get a practitioner who can hold complex ideas without hiding behind them. That is what doctoral clinical work looks like when it is delivered well.

What the practice stands for

The vision that shaped Wise Mynd is that culturally attuned, doctoral-standard, evidence-based psychological work should be available to the people whose lives ask a lot of them, at their peak, not only at their low. The work here is preventive, depth-oriented and outcome-serious. My clients are broadly functioning, often impressively so, and they want expert support to keep it that way, to reach the goals they have set and the ones they have not yet dared to name. I want them to succeed. To build careers with longevity, identities that hold when the audience shifts, and the kind of steadiness that lets them stay in the room when the pressure rises.

Every session is a piece of someone’s life. It is a privilege I try never to take for granted.

• BSc (Hons) Psychology, First-Class, University of Kent
• Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (DClinPsy), University of East London
• Postgraduate Certificate in Evidence-Based Psychological Treatment
• EMDR-trained practitioner
• Trained across multiple therapeutic modalities, including schema-informed, systemic, narrative and liberation-oriented approaches
• Trained in reflective practice models, including the Heads and Hearts model (Arabella Kurtz), the Social GRACES reflective model (UCL) and the critical incident staff support model
• Completed training in coaching for psychologists
• Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol), British Psychological Society
• Registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), registration PYL36440
• Over ten years of specialist clinical experience across NHS, community and private settings
• Tutor and visiting clinical consultant, Royal Holloway, University of London
• Formerly honorary teaching fellow, UCL
• Mentor to trainee psychologists, University of Essex
• Supervisor to clinical psychologists and mental health professionals
• Member of the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network (BAATN)
• Member of the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP-UK)
• Member of the School of Pan-African Thought