Audacious Solidarity
Audacious Solidarity
Courage, Community & Workplace Justice for Therapists
June 28 @ 09:45 - 13:00
Online: Book your place here
Audacious Solidarity: Courage, Community & Workplace Justice for Therapists is the theme for National Counsellors Day 2025. In a climate of austerity, gig-platform “UberTherapy,” and escalating unpaid labour, this conference asks a bold question: how can therapists move from isolated practice to collective power?
Across three interlinked panels, leading UK and US organisers unpick the myth that “any job is the cure,” share frontline lessons from strikes and legal battles against care-tech giants, and showcase feminist, union, and community-based models that place wellbeing over productivity. Expect sharp analysis, lived-experience storytelling, and actionable organising tools that equip counsellors, psychotherapists, and allied mental-health workers to reclaim therapy as a collective right—and to practise with courage, community and justice at the core.
Panel 1
Wellbeing, Work, and Welfare: Opposing the Politics of ‘Work-as-Medicine
Grounded in frontline UK activism, this session interrogates the claim that employment itself is a cure for distress and charts an alternative path for therapists.
Paul Atkinson will talk us through the political dismantling of public counselling provision since the 1970s and the community-based models of free, open-ended therapy that have emerged in response, while Michelle Cardno will talk about the disability-benefits regime that equates employability with wellbeing and its real-world impact on claimants.
Clare Slaney will talk about how poverty and unpaid labour shape the counselling profession itself, and how therapists can organise collectively to resist the exploitation of both clients and practitioners.
Clare Slaney
Clare Slaney is a psychotherapist, supervisor, and writer based in West London, with more than 20 years’ experience working with individuals and groups.
Rooted in Person-Centred and Existential traditions, her practice is grounded in authenticity, paradox, and the continual negotiation between self and society.
Alongside her clinical practice, she speaks and writes on the structural challenges facing the counselling profession, particularly the exploitation of unpaid labour and the impact of poverty on both clients and therapists. Exploring themes of marginalisation, power, and ethics in the counselling professions, she advocates for more honest and equitable practice.
She is an Accredited Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Michelle Cardno
Founder and legally qualified head lawyer and Director at Fightback4Justice, a not-for-profit community-based CIC registered under the name of Advocacy For Disabled People CIC. Michelle holds a LLB law degree with honours, a certificate of education in law and Law AS and has significant experience working in the welfare rights industry. Starting life following her degree at Citizens Advice Bureau as a law advocate in the law department, she then went on run a department at busy solicitors Adamson’s law, setting up and running welfare rights department, offering probono help to those who needed it.
Michelle’s has worked with disabled vulnerable people since 2013, and has gained much experience dealing with the disability benefits PIP, ESA/UC and Child and adult DLA. Along with other social welfare experience including housing and debt, she can advise on policy and the legal areas surrounding these benefits, as well as trends as she sees them on their Facebook community page, which has over 1 million hits a week and 100k followers.
Paul Atkinson
Paul Atkinson is a psychotherapist in independent practice in East London. He has been navigating the intersection of psychotherapy and political activism since the early 1970s, with many spells of apathy, despair and watching telly.
He has chaired two psychoanalytic training organizations, helped found the Free Psychotherapy Network and the campaign for Universal Access to Counselling and Psychotherapy (uACT).
He provides free open-ended psychotherapy at his local community centre in Poplar and is a convener of Mental Health Action. He has six grandchildren.
Panel 2
Platformised Care in the UK: What the Kaiser Strike Teaches Us About UberTherapy’s Future
Learning from the experiences of therapists in the US this session opens up the trajectory for the UK therapy sector.
Garie Connell will talk us through the six month strike and hunger strike of Kaiser Permanente workers in California and Linda Michaels will talk about the economic model that drives platformization of care, and the consequences for therapists including the threat of legal action by digital providers.
Elizabeth Cotton will talk about the 'uberization' of therapy and how we might start to navigate the new business model of UberTherapy.
Elizabeth Cotton
Elizabeth Cotton is a writer and educator in the field of industrial relations and mental health and is Associate Professor for Responsible Business at the University of Leicester. She is a sociologist and a Trustee of the British Sociological Association and Chair of the editorial board of Work, Employment & Society.
She has also trained and worked as a psychotherapist in the UK’s NHS and has had lots of therapy. She comes from a trade union background, working as head of education for a global union federation in the extractive industries and founded Surviving Work (www.survivingwork.org) which explores whether it’s possible to do that.
She coordinates The Digital Therapy Project (www.thedigitaltherapy project.org) with researchers and practitioners looking at the impact of digitalization and platformization on therapeutic labour and on our states of mind.
Her new book UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health is published in October 2025 by Bristol University Press.
Garie Connell
Garie Connell, LCSW, is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker serving as a Medical Social Worker in Pediatrics and High Risk Infant Follow-Up at Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills Hospital in Southern California.
She is a current member and former union steward of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which recently secured a historic four-year contract with Kaiser following a six-month unfair labor practice strike.
In addition to her hospital work, Garie maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Encino, California, and is a prospective psychoanalytic candidate with the Psychoanalytic Center of California beginning in Fall 2025.
Linda Michaels
Linda Michaels, PsyD, MBA is a psychologist with a private practice in Chicago. She is Chair and Co-Founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), a grassroots nonprofit organization that advocates for improved access and awareness of psychotherapy.
She is a Consulting Editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Clinical Associate Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and a fellow of the Lauder Institute Global MBA program.
She is the author and editor of the book Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation, and has published, presented, and been interviewed by the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, NPR among others on the value of psychotherapy, the therapeutic relationship, and technology.
Linda has a former career in business, with over 15 years’ experience consulting to organizations in the US and Latin America.
Panel 3
From Wage Theft to Food Banks: Confronting Therapist Exploitation
Centred on collective care and radical praxis, this session explores how therapists can organise beyond the consulting room to remake the profession itself.
Rebecca Esho Greenslade will describe the process of building grassroots spaces that resist rupture. Mat Pronger shares lessons from the Psychotherapy & Counselling Union on turning practitioner isolation into effective action. Victoria Childs will talk about bringing class politics and critical psychiatry history into the room, and how film, debate and public action can connect psychoanalysis (practice?) to wider social struggles.
Together, they chart practical routes for therapists to move from individual practice toward audacious solidarity.
Victoria Childs
Victoria Childs is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with over thirty years experience in private practice in central London. She is involved in several psychotherapy organisations and in 2015 was a founder member of PCU, the first trade union for psychotherapists and counsellors.
For over twenty years she has also produced films, programmed and chaired events on psychoanalytic topics. She has written and presented material to promote debate around the interface between psychoanalysis and politics, with a particular interest in class politics and the history of critical psychiatry.
Matthew Pronger
Psychotherapy and Counselling Union, Branch Secretary for The North and Midlands. Mat Pronger, MSc, MBACP, is a private practitioner based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He has worked in schools, universities and charities, with adults and young people.
Mat is a branch secretary in the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union, and enjoys the community and power that comes when groups of therapists team up.
Prior to being a counsellor, Mat worked as a teaching assistant and care worker, and spent two years working in North Eastern Japan. Mat also works as a musician and has a troubling taste in music.
Rebecca Esho Greenslade
Rebecca Esho Greenslade (she/her) is an existential-feminist psychotherapist, supervisor and educator. Her therapeutic experience ranges from working in schools, palliative care and with the Psychosis Therapy Project, alongside an independent practice. In 2018,
Rebecca founded Gaia Therapy Project – a community therapy project at Hackney City Farm in East London, which has now transitioned to Gaia Therapy Collective.
She is the founder of the Feminist Therapy Network – a community for therapeutic practitioners interested in feminist perspectives and praxis within the psy-disciplines.
Her writings explore the interstices between psychotherapy, critical phenomenology, spiritual activism and liberatory feminisms; publications include: The Clinician As Killjoy (Without Killing Joy) (2025), The Other of a Feminist Praxis of Empathy (2020) and Existential Psychotherapy and the Therapeutics of Activism (2018).
Rebecca is currently undertaking PhD research with the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London that considers how a spiritualised feminist therapeutics can intervene in contemporary modes of alienation.
She is a Zen practitioner in the White Plum lineage and Zen Buddhist chaplain.