Meet 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

My training is deliberately broad. I qualified across several therapeutic models rather than one, so the work can be fitted to the person in front of me rather than to a template. Alongside clinical training, I have specialist grounding in the psychology of audience and identity, and in healing the effects of racism, which is why cultural and racial identity are treated here as clinical material rather than as background.

I remain in regular supervision, continue to train, and keep my own practice under review. That is partly professional requirement and partly a view about the work: a practitioner who is not looking after their own mind cannot reliably look after anyone else’s.

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. I have received formal training in management and leadership, and have been involved in developing and delivering that training across a range of contexts. 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 qualifications, memberships, training and experience is available on the Credentials page.

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 and systemic 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 shared understanding, 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.

The structure this takes in practice, from assessment through to review, is set out on The Wise Mynd approach. The framework it is organised around is The Seven Pillars of Wise Mynd.

Discretion is built into how the work is arranged, not added on request.

Further reading: Why well-functioning people do therapy · The dilemmas of a visible life

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 and depth-focused, and it takes outcomes seriously. My clients are usually doing well, 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.

• Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (DClinPsy), University of East London
• HCPC-registered Clinical Psychologist (PYL36440)
• Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol), British Psychological Society
• EMDR-trained practitioner
• Over ten years of specialist clinical experience across NHS, community and private settings
• Visiting Clinical Consultant, Royal Holloway, University of London
• Supervisor to clinical psychologists and mental health professionals
• Winner, 2025 WeAreTheCity Rising Star Award for Diversity & Inclusion

View credentials and professional standards →