Dr Christine Dunkley

Dr Christine Dunkley is a consultant psychotherapist and senior accredited practitioner with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is also a Senior Trainer in the British Isles Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Training Team. She original qualified as a medical social worker in 1982, moving into psychological therapy in 1986. Since retiring from 20 years in an NHS psychology department she supervises specialist treatment teams across the UK and Ireland in the delivery of mindfulness-based therapies. She is an international trainer in the treatment of suicidal self-harming patients using DBT.

Christine Dunkley has over 20 publications including ‘Teaching Clients to Use Mindfulness Skills’, Dunkley & Stanton, Routledge (2014) ‘Using Mindfulness skills in Everyday Life’ Dunkley and Stanton, Routledge (2016) and the ‘Core Components of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy’ DVD series with Michaela Swales. She provided a guest editorial for the European Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy in 2013, for their special edition on Mindfulness, and has written numerous articles for the BACP journal on supervision and risk. She was the co-founder and first chair of the Society for DBT (www.SfDBT.org).She was a clinical consultant on the treatment development team for Radical Openness, a £3M multi-site NHS Randomised Controlled Trial for Treatment Resistant Depression. She has been an invited speaker at events in the UK, France, Ireland and New Zealand.

Christine’s doctoral research at the University of Southampton was on the communication of emotional pain between suicidal patients and NHS staff. She sat on the national Personality Disorders expert reference group at University College London and is an honorary lecturer for the University of Bangor. She was awarded a fellowship for her services to the Society for DBT in 2016.