Domestic Abuse and Mental Health

Who is this course for?

This course will be helpful for anyone working with or supporting people who have experienced domestic abuse, including counsellors, psychotherapists, mental health nurses, psychologists, social workers, and domestic abuse support workers.

What will I learn?

Experiences of abuse can have a lasting impact on a person’s self-confidence and self-esteem, ability to make decisions, and trust in others, as well as generating symptoms of depression, high anxiety, complex trauma, and thoughts of suicide. This can severely impact on a person’s ability to seek support. This course will explore the main psychological theories of domestic abuse, how abuse happens, why and how this affects an individual’s mental health, and what can be done to positively support the person’s mental health recovery.

How will I learn?

The workshop will bring together a combination of theory, practice and case studies within the sessions, together with group work and personal reflection.

How will my employer benefit?

Service focus is often on what to do after the service user/client/patient accesses the service. However, there can sometimes be high levels of DNA (did not attend) in this field of work and apparent inequalities in terms of the profiles of people who access these services. Here, we will explore how a person might access services, what is important to them, and what this means for services who want to be accessible and attractive to everyone who has experienced domestic abuse. We will also explore how someone might build a relationship with the service provider once accessed and how services can be developed to meet their needs better. This training, when implemented, can help to significantly reduce DNA levels and increase accessibility.

The workshop will be led by Dr Jeannette Roddy, PhD. Jeannette is a qualified counsellor/psychotherapist and is an accredited member of BACP. She has been working with and conducting research into client experiences of domestic abuse counselling and mental health support for the last 15 years. She is the author of ‘Counselling and Psychotherapy after Domestic Violence: a client view of what helps recovery’ (Palgrave, 2015), ‘A competency framework for domestic violence counselling’ (with Lynne Gabriel in 2019), and editor and main contributor to ‘Working with client experiences of domestic abuse: a handbook for counsellors, psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners’. After a career in higher education, she is used to teaching, yet she describes her teaching style as ‘Essentially pragmatic'. "What matters most to me is helping people to understand and to support their clients more effectively. I find exploring the reality of situations that can occur with hints and tips for how to respond can be as helpful to people as the theory."