with Lesley Simpson-Gray

Workshop details:

In this workshop Lesley examines how her creative journey using immersive technology led her to embrace important, collective challenges and experiences faced by many of the UK’s Black mental health professionals. She reflects on intersectionality and the need to articulate the hidden experiences of neurodiversity amongst ethnic populations in Britain. Lesley focuses on the recent pandemic and how it caused lasting disruptions for some, and the opportunity to unmask for others. She celebrates the ways that new technology in online psychotherapy invites us to embrace a customised profile and emerge as our authentic selves.

Lesley shares highlights from her personal and professional journey and guides you through a therapeutic experience using immersive visualizations and 3D tools as you reflect on your own self-identity. She emphasises the importance of using technology to create online therapeutic spaces which are inclusive and accessible to all.

This workshop is appropriate for:

Qualified and in-training Counsellors, Psychotherapists or Psychologists working online with Children, Young People and Adults

How this Workshop may impact participants’ practice:

Working in this way can help professionals working online to reflect on the self-identity needs of all clients, and especially those with differences in culture and neurodiversity.

About Lesley:

Lesley is an experienced Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and certified Cyber-Therapist. She has used her long-held passion for imagery, music and the creative arts to underpin her professional training at the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education.

She has run her private psychotherapy practice since 2017 and she moved from ‘in-person’ therapy to a 3D virtual playroom in 2020. Her therapeutic framework combines neuroscience, digital creative arts, and a blend of the physical and virtual worlds to deliver playful, immersive interventions.

Lesley’s lived experience as a black, British professional has led to her special interest in raising the profile of neurodiversity, especially amongst care-experienced children and young people with a cultural connection to the African diaspora. For several years she worked for a national UK charity as a young people’s advocate and independent mental health advocate.

Lesley designs and delivers her own series of cyber-creativity workshops and training programmes. Her goal is to help mental health professionals to gain IT skills and confidence for online creative arts therapy.