Mind’s Eye – Spring 2026

BPF news:

At the end of 2025,  it was announced that the bpf had been ranked 43rd in the National Centre for Diversity’s Top 100 Most Inclusive UK Employers Index 2025. Being ranked 43rd places the bpf in the top half of the UK’s most inclusive organisations that entered the Index that year. This indicates that the bpf is performing strongly against national standards for inclusion, and is doing better than many organisations across sectors, including larger and better‑resourced ones. It shows that inclusion is embedded and demonstrable, rather than aspirational or informal.

Join:

IPA Asia Pacific Conference – Seoul 2026

5th IPA Asia Pacific Conference

Seoul 2026

29 April – 1 May 2026. In person. Early bird discount available.

Narcissism Re-imagined: From Loss to Love

At the 2026 Seoul Asia Pacific Conference, we will engage in discussions about dynamic analytic processes that foster genuine transformation. These processes can enable individuals, trapped in narcissistic vulnerability and regression, to risk the pain of loss, integrate the fragmented self, and ultimately discover themselves, create meaning, and attain true intimacy and love.

Listen to:

BBC Sounds – The Essay – Available Episodes

Phillippa Perry takes us through settings where music is an integral part of people’s mental health.

Mad in the UK

Really fascinating website/podcasts/articles challenging prevailing orthodoxies round everything to do with mental health in 2026. First person interviews/Q and As etc . Topics covered include ADHD, mysticism, madness, and many others. Read the article/Q and A with the clearheaded Robert Whitaker from Mad in America.

The Good Enough Mother with Professor Alessandra Lemma

‘I’ve long been fascinated with the idea of good enough, not only in mothering but, actually, for so many things. We tend to live in a world of extremes now: things are amazing or awful. Yet most of us live in the ordinary, the ‘enough’’.

Podcast series with the excellent Annalisa Barbieri. The Good Enough Mother with Professor Alessandra Lemma – Conversations with Annalisa Barbieri | Acast

‘In this episode chartered clinical and counselling psychologist, psychoanalyst and a fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society Professor Alessandra Lemma and I discuss what it is to be a good enough mother, a phrase coined by the the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in the 1950s. We talk about what might matter and what really doesn’t, and it might not be what you think.’

Complex with Kimberley Wilson BBC Sounds – Complex with Kimberley Wilson

Podcasts from psychologist Kimberley Wilson on a vast range of topics, from empathy overload, via narcissism to ADHD. She talks to experts, and considers listeners stories, and gives very useful tips.

Watch:

 MINDinMIND | Interviewing Leaders In Mental Health 

Mind in Mind legacy interviews with Jeremy Holmes, Beatrice Beebe,Margaret Rustin and others.

Bing Videos 

TedX talk by Petra Velzeboer, Jonkoping University – Reframing Diagnosis and the Road to Recovery. 

Trauma and Neurodivergence Conference 2026 (Online) | Anna Freud 

London, hybrid. 21 April.  

This conference is aimed at clinicians who want to deepen their understanding of the lived experience of trauma for neurodivergent children and young people. Throughout the day, we will unpack the interplay between trauma and neurodivergence and highlight key strategies clinicians can use to adapt their practice to better support neurodivergent young people who have experienced trauma. 

Visit:

What’s On | Bethlem Museum of the Mind 

Museum of the Mind, South London, until 27 June 2026. 

Kindred: The loneliness of suffering and the community of lived experience. 

Free. 

Human experience is a matter of history, memory, and community. It is never just individual. Our interactions in families, friendship groups, and neighbourhoods, networks of interest and support, all impinge on our identity, whether for good or for ill. And in a climate of political, cultural, and economic atomisation, social cohesion seems elusive. 

The presence, or absence, of community is felt especially keenly in the face of mental health challenges. The artists whose work is represented in the collections of Bethlem Museum of the Mind represent this in a range of ways, arising from their diverse perspectives. ‘Listen to me, talk to me, understand me’, they appear to say. ‘Don’t just medicate me.’ 

The Weight of Being – Two Temple Place 

Admission FREE, no booking required. 

Two Temple Place is delighted to announce our next exhibition The Weight of Being, curated by Angela Thomas. 

The Weight of Being will explore the profound ways in which external pressures shape artistic expression, mental health, and resilience, highlighting the power of art as a means of expression, resistance, and survival. 

Including the work of a diverse range of twentieth century and contemporary artists and their varying perspectives, The Weight of Being will showcase how artists have captured the psychological and emotional impact of societal pressures, resilience in the face of adversity, and existential uncertainty. 

Through the wide range of artists, mediums, and represented demographics, The Weight of Being is intended to spark meaningful conversations about resilience, identity, and emotional well-being, offering a profound reflection on the toll of existence and the strength found in shared experiences, ultimately fostering hope and deepening understanding. 

Go to (Global):

Call_CMH_3.pdf 

Call for proposals 3rd International Conference Culture & Mental Health: Youth. Ghent, Belgium. 

The third Culture & Mental Health international conference will take place in Ghent, Belgium on 26 and 27 November 2026. This conference seeks to promote learning, discussion and debate around cultural interventions aimed at improving the wellbeing of people recovering from mental health difficulties or people in a vulnerable situation. We also want to give a platform to cultural and artistic practices that raise awareness or critically reflect on systemic inequalities, contextual factors or policies that compromise mental health. The central theme of this edition is on ‘Youth’. 

International Postgraduate Conference on Psychoanalytically Informed Trainings

Online (University of Exeter) 26 September 2026

Details: Events | University of Exeter

Home – IPA Asia Pacific Conference – Seoul 2026 

Narcissism reimagined: from loss to love 

5^th IPA Asia Pacific Conference 

Seoul 2026 

29 April – 1 May 2026. In person. Early bird discount available. 

At the 2026 Seoul Asia Pacific Conference, we will engage in discussions about dynamic analytic processes that foster genuine transformation. These processes can enable individuals, trapped in narcissistic vulnerability and regression, to risk the pain of loss, integrate the fragmented self, and ultimately discover themselves, create meaning, and attain true intimacy and love. 

Too mad to be true IV | Psychiatrie en Filosofie 

Too Mad to be True IV – Madness and its Expressions 

May 14-15, 2026, Ghent (Belgium)  + online 

The fourth edition of Too Mad to be True will take place on May 14 and 15, 2026, once again in the magnificent Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent. This year’s theme is Madness and its Expressions.  (Image: ‘My visions, as they happen’, Lorna Collins.) 

Madness has been a privileged object of interest across a broad range of disciplines, including the mental health sciences (psychiatry/psychology), philosophy, mad studies, religion studies, aesthetics and anthropology. In each of these disciplines, madness acquires a different expression and meaning, partly determined by prevailing assumptions, aims, fears and desires: madness as the expression of pathology and explanatory or therapeutic ambition in the mental health sciences; as a real-life thought experiment or as circumscribing the bounds of reason and sense in philosophy; as a site for revolution, political critique and emancipation in mad studies; as (a potential threat to) authentic belief or divine inspiration in religion; as embodying (the limits to) artistic creativity and cultural exploitation in aesthetics; or as a cultural construct that provides a mirror into particular cultures and societies. Alongside, and through, these diverse disciplinary expressions, there is the expression of madness by mad individuals themselves, whose voice is muffled, amplified, transformed and appropriated. In this fourth edition of the Too Mad to be True conference, we interrogate and offer a forum for these different expressions and configurations of madness, around six subthemes (see here). 

Read:

Full article: Group psychotherapy for young people with gender-related distress  January 2026. 

Recent research article from our associated journal British Journal of Psychotherapy  (open access) 

This paper describes the evolution, learning and key components of a group psychotherapy provision for adolescents experiencing gender-related distress (GRD). It suggests that this approach has much to contribute to current consideration of what help for this population could include. 

September 2025 Newsletter: Voices of Care Experience and Adoption 

Aashna newsletter on care experience and adoption 

The big issue: The end of trust
Therapy Today, March 2026

Ellie Broughton explores how therapists work in the age of misinformation, scepticism and conspiracy theory.

Support:

Sigmund Freud Library Conservation Appeal – Freud Museum London 

When Freud fled Vienna in 1938 under the shadow of Nazi persecution, he was unable to bring his entire library with him to London. Therefore, we can only infer that the titles he chose to rescue and which are preserved here at 20 Maresfield Gardens, are those that meant the most to him. These books represent not only a fascinating document of the sources of his inspiration, but also an enduring resource for scholars and explorers looking to delve into the Freudian universe. Help us raise £30,000 to preserve Freud’s Library. 

Donations welcome to support Freud’s library 

Good books… are books to which one stands in rather the same relationship as to “good” friends, to whom one owes a part of one’s knowledge of life and view of the world…  Sigmund Freud, 1907. 

Scroll:

Dr. Aaron Balick (@draaronb) | TikTok 

Bitesize psychotherapy! From Oedipus Complex to ego defence and much more. 

Check out the Bpf on Bluesky 

@psychotherapy

Books on the mind:

Unspeakable – Gwen Adshead 

Faber: 2026. 

A widow dares not utter her husband’s name. A prisoner of war buries the memories of his ordeal. A child hostage is rendered mute. What happens when trauma goes unspoken? 
 
The pioneering psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead invites us to witness her work with patients struggling in the wake of a range of distressing and painful life events. Drawn from over thirty years of clinical practice, Unspeakable illuminates how language – and silence – can dramatically affect the quality of our recovery after disaster. Sometimes the hardest words to say out loud are the very ones to set us free and with Adshead’s assistance and extraordinary insight, these courageous people step out of the darkness of shame and fear to discover new possibilities. 
 
This is not a book about trauma, it is about survival. In challenging prevailing misconceptions around trauma and by charting the transformation of patient identities, hearts and minds, Unspeakable makes a powerful case for hope. 

A bpf Event with Gwen ‘Unspeakable: Survival and Transformation after Trauma’ will be taking place online on Friday the 17th of April at 19:30 BST. Book your place to attend here.