For the last 15 years or so I’ve been working as a psychologist in primary and secondary schools. I’ve been assessing kids for learning problems like dyslexia and I’ve been counselling teenagers dealing with emotional problems. These are my two main interests as a psychologist.
Firstly, I’m interested in helping children and adolescents to read and write better. I can identify barriers to learning, such as with attention, anxiety, short-term memory, and letter-sound knowledge, and I can suggest ways to remedy and accommodate for these. I can also work out if a learning difficulty like dyslexia is the reason for your child’s reading and spelling struggles. I am also trained in the phonics program, Soundswrite, and have been using it to help primary school children to read and spell better.
Secondly, I am a counselling psychologist interested in working with adolescents 10-17 years whose anxiety and depressive symptoms are distressing and getting in the way of them living a fuller life. I work from the position that, underlying these symptoms, there is usually an emotional problem that the teen is having a tough time expressing and making sense of. As such their grades can suffer, they can’t pay attention or remember things, they act out, and they can be hard to "reach".