Alison Roy

Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist

Alison Roy is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist in East Sussex and has been working as a psychotherapist for 20 years.

Alison is also the co-founder and clinical lead for the CAMHS and East Sussex Post Adoption Mental Health Service – AdCAMHS. Her work focuses on understanding trauma and distress and how this manifests itself within individuals, couples, families and organisations.

Alison has written a book on adoption, A for Adoption, and has also contributed a chapter to the book, Education through the arts for wellbeing and community (Burke, Cunningham and Hoare).

In addition to her NHS post, Alison works independently in private practice with adults and adoptive families, focusing on parental relationships. She also facilitates reflective practice groups within the public and corporate sector.

Previously Alison was the Director of Communications for the Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP) and the editor for the ACP Bulletin. Before training as a psychotherapist, she was the director of a community arts project called Generations Arts Project, worked as an arts critic, and edited a youth magazine. She contributes regularly to main-stream media on topics relating to emotional wellbeing and mental health.

“As busy and beleaguered professionals we can become so concerned with our own capacity to manage, that we fail to take in or appreciate the impact on parents and their wider family, of caring for some of society’s most compromised and vulnerable children at great cost to themselves. Failure to notice this affects our practice and can seriously limit the protective function of the professional network surrounding an adopted child. This is where supervision and reflective practice plays a key role, and I shall explore how this aspect of our work can help to shift things when they start to feel stuck, before the fatigue sets in.”