Notes on Contributors

Lord Alderdice is a psychoanalytic psychiatrist who as Alliance Party Leader was one of the negotiators of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the Irish Troubles. He was Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, President of Liberal International (the global liberal political family) and Chair of the Liberals in the House of Lords. One of the youngest ever life peers when appointed to the House of Lords in 1996, he has been awarded many honorary doctorates, fellowships, and prizes including the 2022 Royal College of Psychiatrists Lifetime Achievement Award and, in 2024, Honorary Fellowship of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Jack Blake completed his medical training in Keele University where he trained in the West Midlands. Dr Blake maintains a broad academic interest having presented and published on various topics including personality disorder, neuropsychiatry, medical humanities, and medical education in psychiatry. Prior to Dr Blake's medical training, he worked as a social therapist in the Millfields Unit from 2014 to 2016 which was an adapted therapeutic community, in a medium-secure forensic setting, set up for the treatment of high-risk offenders with personality disorders. Currently, Dr Blake is training in greater Manchester as a core psychiatric trainee beginning in August 2023. He was appointed a board member of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy in June 2024.

Sira Dermen (1942-2023), a noted London-based psychoanalyst and child and adolescent psychotherapist and member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, worked for many decades at the Portman Clinic, specialising in forensic psychotherapy.

Marcus Evans is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society with over forty-five years of experience in mental health. He served as a consultant psychotherapist and mental health nurse, and held the position of head of the nursing discipline at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust from 1998 to 2018. Additionally, he played a pivotal role as o