Meet our highly qualified tutors who deliver the Human Development Scotland (HDS) training programme.

Here are some of the tutors currently working with HDS.

Alison P Brown

Alison's first career was in criminology and legal and social research in universities, government and charities. She trained in psychodynamic counselling at the University of Edinburgh. She has a particular interests in gender, trauma, neurodiversity, and the psychodynamics of organisations. She currently manages a local mental health charity counselling service in Forth Valley alongside private
practice as a supervisor and counsellor.

Liz Cairns

Liz has worked in educational settings in a variety of roles for over 35 years. She was a teacher for 11 years before undertaking further training. As a result, she has Graduate and Post Graduate clinical qualifications from all 3 Glasgow Universities, as well as Edinburgh University.

Liz has supported a number of voluntary sector organisations to create and deliver Counsellor and Arts Psychotherapy training at Graduate and Masters level. Most recently here at HDS she has developed the Psychodynamic Counsellor training for HDS in conjunction with RGU and continue to lead that highly regarded clinical training programme.

Her clinical work focusses mainly on work with children, young people and their families. On leaving teaching Liz set up, developed and ran the highly regarded Youth Counselling Service for NHS Lanarkshire. Based in both North and South Lanarkshire it was the first service in Scotland to roll out universal provision of Counselling in all its secondary schools.

Liz now works privately with young people in schools and in the community and provide clinical supervision and specialist supports to individuals and organisations working with trauma and abuse.

She is a proud Glaswegian, having lived all her life in the city. She has 3 grown up daughters with their own lives and careers. Liz enjoys travelling and reading nonclinical texts. She cooks to relax and destress.

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David Cornelius

David lives and works in Aberdeen and is currently Principal Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist in NHS Grampian.  David grew up in South Wales but started his working career as a residential care worker in the Ealing, London working with young people with intellectual and mental health difficulties.  He completed his training as social worker at Brunel University in 1999 and thereafter, worked in adult mental health and old age psychiatry in Hampstead and Kentish Town.  He left London for the north east of England and he took up a post as CAMHS specialist social worker in North Tyneside in 2003 and while there he completed the psychoanalytic infant observational studies course (MPOS) and was accepted onto the clinical training with the Northern School of Child Psychotherapy where he trained and qualified as a child and adolescent psychotherapist in 2013.  Until taking up his current post in Grampian, he was working as a child and adolescent psychotherapist in the Newcastle and Gateshead Children and Young People’s Service (CYPS) employed by Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust.

David is a full member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists and is a member of the ACP Climate Change Group which is concerned with promoting awareness of the impact climate change upon children and young people’s mental health.

He enjoys very long walks and will often be found in the hills and forests of Aberdeenshire.

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Devika Dhar

Devika is an Integrative Psychotherapist registered with UKCP (United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy) to work with adults and children and adolescents.  She has also completed an MSc in Psychoanalytic Observation.  Devika is also an Organisational Therapist registered with APPCIOS (Association for Psychodynamic Practice and Counselling in Organisational Settings). In the past, she has been registered with the BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) as a Gestalt counsellor. 

Devika has worked in the NHS as a counsellor in primary care, with fostering and adoption agencies as a psychotherapist for children in the looked after system, in psychotherapy private practice with adults and young people, in voluntary sector in schools as a counsellor. She has  provided consultancy to adults in a residential school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties thinking about the interface between the impact of the work with the children on them and their own issues on their work with the children. 

Devika runs a baby observation group registered with APPCIOS, as well as a group with Trudy Darien called “Understanding Race from a Psychodynamic Perspective”. Devika works in private practice as a counsellor/psychotherapist for First Psychology working with adults, children and families. She teaches Institutional Processes (how organisations and people in them are affected by working with trauma or go through emotional situations) on Human Development Scotland’s MSc in Psychoanalytic Observation. Devika has recently taken on the role of co-ordinator for the Online Therapeutic Service for APPCIOS.

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Debbie Hindle

Dr Debbie Hindle is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist, trained at the Tavistock Clinic. For 10 years, she was Head of the Clinical Training in Child Psychotherapy at the Scottish Institute of Human Relations in Edinburgh and worked clinically in a specialist Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service in Glasgow for children who were fostered or adopted. 

She has written extensively, including 3 co-edited books – Personality Development: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (1999); The Emotional Experience of Adoption: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (2008);and Sibling Matters: A Psychoanalytic, Developmental and Systemic Approach (2014). Now retired from the NHS, she continues to teach, supervise and lecture. 

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Fanny Lena

Fanny is a Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist who trained at the Tavistock Centre in London. 

Fanny has worked clinically with children, young people and families for 15 years, in a variety of NHS settings and in private practice. 

Before training at the Tavistock, Fanny qualified and worked as a psychologist in Italy and developed a specialist interest in parent-infant interventions and attachment research.

Fanny worked in CAMHS for several years, where she gained extensive experience of supporting therapeutically children and young people with a wide range of mental health difficulties including depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders, attachment difficulties, externalising problems, complex and intergenerational trauma, and neurodevelopmental difficulties. As well as offering long term and time limited psychotherapy to children and adolescents, Fanny developed a specialist interest in parent work and parent-infant psychotherapy.

Fanny worked as a highly specialist child psychotherapist in mainstream and specialist educational settings, both as part of CAMHS outreach services in schools and as a member of a multidisciplinary team in a therapeutic school for children with complex social emotional and mental health needs. Fanny has taught Infant Observation, Work Discussion, Psychoanalytic Theory and Child Development Research on MA programmes at the Tavistock Centre and has been offering supervision to professionals working in a variety of settings.

She is currently working in private practice in Edinburgh.

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Grant Wilkie

Grant initially trained as a medical doctor before specialising in psychiatry at the Royal Edinburgh hospital. He moved to Glasgow in 1989 to take up a post as a senior registrar in Psychotherapy and over the next 5 years underwent training through SIHR to qualify as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. Grant is a member of BPC and the Scottish Association of Psychoanalysts.

In 1996 Grant took up a post as a consultant psychiatrist in Psychotherapy with NHS Lanarkshire. The main remit was to develop a psychodynamic psychotherapy service for this area of Scotland which previously had none. This involved a great deal of teaching and supervision and he also chaired the Psychotherapy section of the College of Psychiatrists in Scotland.

Besides Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Grant is interested in systemic thinking and the application of psychoanalytic and systemic thinking in the understanding of organisational life. He has completed the first 2 years of the systemic training previously run by SIHR.

Grant has retired from NHS and now has a small independent practice, providing individual Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy where he also supervises trainees and more experienced practitioners.