Adam Ottley-Porter

Adam is one of the Lecturers on the Advanced Practice in Psychological Wellbeing programme, training clinicians to deliver low intensity therapy for anxiety and depression within the national NHS Talking Therapies pathway. This involves teaching, creating and updating the materials for delivering his lectures, marking and assessing a variety of assignments and working as a personal tutor who liaises with the placement services the students/trainees are working in. He is also co-lead on Module 1 which looks at how PWP's assess and engage their patients.

Adam also works as a Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner (PWP) within an NHS Talking Therapies service. This involves supporting people with mild to moderate symptoms of depression and anxiety. This is a mixture of 1-1, group and computerised support. Within this role he is also a supervisor and line manager and completed further training to work with long term physical health conditions. 

His working background prior to his PWP role has been primarily working with individuals who have moderate or severe Learning Disabilities and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Adam continues to liaise regularly with colleagues in these services as part of his PWP role to ensure people that have a Learning Disability and are are able to access mainstream mental health services are provided the opportunity to do so. This remains a key area of interest and influences Adam's passion for improving accessibility to all who may have some form of neurodiversity. 

Adam's other area of interest is around perinatal mental health/care. This relates both to mothers and mothers to be having worked with many perinatal mothers struggling with depression and anxiety, but also extends to partner wellbeing and improving/normalising conversations around baby loss. This has led to his current, and future, blog posts and videos around normalising baby loss being published by Tommy's (National Pregnancy and Baby Loss Charity) and circulated on social media.