Free Members' Webinar: Pride Month 2023 – Celebrating Rainbow/LGBTQ+ families in psychiatry

The path to parenthood as a person who identifies as LGBTQ+ is not always simple, and balancing this with a career as a doctor adds an additional layer of complexity. During this webinar we will hear from our speakers about some of the beautiful rainbow families that exist in our community.

Alan Mackenzie is a Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist working in Glasgow. Alan is an executive member of the Rainbow SIG at the RCPsych and also a member of the Scottish Workforce and Careers Committee (SWCC) at RCPsych in Scotland. Alan is also an advisor to the Mental Health Directorate at the Scottish Government, with a particular focus on workforce. Alan has interests in medical education, workforce recruitment and retention and combatting stigma associated with mental illness. Outside of work, Alan is kept busy by his 8-year-old twins but still finds time to enjoy running, cycling and singing.

"During psychiatry training, my husband and I adopted 3-year-old twins. I will talk about how I managed to balance psychiatry training with the adoption process. I will talk about some of the challenges and my thoughts on how these could be overcome. I will also talk about how being a father has made me a better clinician and made me re-evaluate my work/life balance."

Máire Cooney is a Consultant Rehabilitation Psychiatrist working in Lanarkshire. She is an executive member and past chair of the Rainbow SIG at the RCPsych. She is a medical member of the Mental Health Tribunal Service and a Designated Medical Practitioner with the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland.

"In 2005 my partner and I had a civil partnership. Shortly after we began the process of becoming adoptive parents and adopted our two boys the following year. We added many rabbits, rats, cats, and dogs to the family over the years, and are all still muddling along well enough. I will talk about the experience of being assessed and evaluated as a potential adoptive parent and new mother and the stress of presenting myself as fully in control both at home and at work."

Tom Higgins is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He is a teacher, training therapist and training supervisor at the Bowlby Centre. He has trained in many other modalities including group analysis, EMDR, Compassion-focused therapy and Mentalisation-based therapy.

He has worked for 25 years in NHS mental health services including Child and Adolescent mental health services and in Peri-natal mental health. For the past 15 years much of his work has been with clients with a diagnosis of EUPD, many of whom are struggling to look after themselves and struggling to parent their children. He has been supervising psychiatrists at various points in their training for many years.

He is passionate about supporting parents to understand the impact of their own childhood trauma and breaking the inter-generational cycles, to enable them to better attune to the psychological needs of their own children. He is deeply committed to providing psychotherapy to members of the LGBTQIA community to support them in overcoming the impact of oppression including oppression that has become internalised.

He works in private practice as an individual, couple and group psychotherapist and spends lots of time on the beach with his daughter.

Questions can either be submitted using the Q&A function during the webinar, or you can email them in advance to bethany.shaheir@rcpsych.ac.uk.

You can find out more about past and upcoming webinars and catch up on demand with any you have missed on our website.