Dr Karen Ann Wright

Dr Karen Ann Wright, BA, MA, PhD.

Karen is an integrative psychotherapist and arts psychotherapist registered with BAAT and HCPC. Karen holds a PhD from Goldsmiths University and completed her MA from the university of Hertfordshire.  Karen has also completed training in DBT.

 Karen has many years’ experience in private practice as well as within the NHS. She is an approved BAAT, accredited private practitioner and supervisor having set up and established her private psychotherapy practice 21 years ago, working mainly with young people and families, as well as offering supervision to therapists, counsellors, teachers and support workers. Karen manages a group of art psychotherapists within her private practice. 

 Karen also works as a Course Leader and Senior Lecturer at Regent’s University London.

 In Karen’s previous work within the NHS in a Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service as a band 8a senior clinician and part of the senior management team, she provided specialist psychotherapy, integrative, DBT and specialised art psychotherapy. During her time working in the NHS, Karen developed and taught interventions and programmes of care such as, art psychotherapy with DBT, a condensed model of DBT and a social justice orientated psychotherapy which gave good patient outcomes. She was the lead on patient participation as well as leading on organising away days for staff wellbeing and training.  Karen has successfully supervised and mentored many mental health trainees over the years. 

 Karen established the Social Justice in Art Therapy group after jointly developing a practice enhancement activity and resource hub for art psychotherapists in partnership with her sister Dr Toni Wright, Canterbury Christ Church University. Karen is a member of the quiet activism collective Beneath the Alma Mater and designed the logo. She is also a co-founder and member of an interdisciplinary interprofessional transatlantic network.

 Karen’s research uses mixed methods that enable and centres on the service user’s voice; interviewing them about their experience, enabling them to have a say in the design of future therapy. Karen sees psychotherapy as a powerful tool in enabling people to increase their self-awareness, work towards both better mental health and accessing their potential.

 Karen has authored on her research on critical feminist approaches to art psychotherapy and has jointly authored and published on critical praxis, feminist, intersectional, social justice, and social action approaches in arts therapy praxis.

 

Research-interests: critical feminism, gender, class, body image, gender and social media.