Gerry Byrne

Gerry is a DPhil student (part-time) and also a member of St Antony’s College. For his doctoral research, Gerry is exploring the role and mechanism of epistemic trust in reducing maltreatment in high-risk families undergoing the Lighthouse Mentalisation-based Treatment Parenting Programme. He is supervised by Professor Jane Barlow. 

Gerry is a consultant child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist (Tavistock), a consultant nurse, and adult psychotherapist. He is also a mentalisation-based treatment (MBT) practitioner, supervisor, and trainer (adult, adolescent and family) for the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. He trains and supervises MBT programmes and clinicians in the UK and internationally and leads on MBT trainings for the Centre in Ireland. 

In September 2021, Gerry founded SOLAS Oxford CIC, a not-for-profit community interest company whose mission is to support health and social care professionals working with vulnerable, complex, risk laden clinical populations to enhance the quality and effectiveness of their therapeutic relationships, through bespoke training, supervision, adaptation of treatment programmes, and innovation. In collaboration with Alessandro Talia, PhD, SOLAS Oxford have developed a radical model of Attachment-informed Supervision and Training for Psychotherapists (AiSTP). 

Prior to his DPhil studies, Gerry spent 35 years as a clinician in specialist NHS mental health services. His primary focus as a clinician and designer of services over the last 32 years, has been the expert assessment and treatment of families in which severe child abuse has taken place. For the last 16 years he was Head of Attachment and Perinatal Services at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. He designed and ran four award-winning specialist CAMHS services; the Family Assessment and Safeguarding Services (FASS Oxford & FASS Wiltshire and BATHNES), the Reconnect Service (Buckinghamshire) and the Infant-Parent Perinatal Service (Oxford). In addition, he was Clinical Lead for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire and served three years as Associate Clinical Director of CAMHS. 

Gerry developed, in collaboration with Nick Midgley, Anthony Bateman and Peter Fonagy at the Anna Freud National Centre, an approach and treatment programme aimed at reducing the risk of maltreatment in high-risk families - The Lighthouse MBT-Parenting Programme (LLP). 

The LPP is a manualised, innovative adaptation of mentalisation-based treatment (MBT) which aims to prevent child maltreatment by promoting epistemic trust, mentalizing and sensitive caregiving in parents. It is rooted in psychoanalytic, attachment and mentalisation concepts. Currently there are six, separate manualised Lighthouse MBT-P programmes for different populations.

The Lighthouse Parenting Programme is undergoing randomised-controlled trials (RCTs) in England and Germany. In England, the Supporting Parents Project (SPP) is a two-arm multi-site randomised controlled trial which aims to evaluate the Lighthouse Parenting Programme in Children's Social Care for parents of a child aged 12 or under who have been on a Child Protection Plan in the last 12 months. Funded by a grant from What Works for Children’s Social Care the trial is conducted by the Child Attachment and Psychological Therapies Research (ChAPTRe) team (Dr Michelle Sleed, Professor Nick Midgley and Professor Pasco Fearon (Anna Freud National Centre and UCL). In Germany, an adapted version of the Lighthouse programme was pilot tested (Volkert et al, 2019) and is now undergoing a RCT as part of the UBICA-2 Project (Understanding and Breaking the Intergenerational Cycle of Abuse) led by Professor Svenja Taubner at the University of Heidelberg. The aim of this randomised controlled intervention study is to break the transgenerational vicious circle of child abuse through a prevention programme aimed at mothers and fathers who are considered a risk group for child abuse. 

In addition, there are pilot studies of the shorter 12-session programme in Portugal, Lithuania, and Ireland and a pilot study of the multi-family version is planned for 2022. Outside of the UK, the programme is being delivered clinically in Poland, Ireland, Portugal, Lithuania, Spain, Germany, Australia, Argentina, and trainings are planned for teams in Israel, Brazil, Denmark and Belgium in 2022-2023. 

The work of the Lighthouse Programme was featured in a documentary on Radio 4 on 1 February 2019 entitled Seeing Unseen Children. 

Gerry is also author of a children’s picture book, All at Sea, published by Walker about a little boy who has bad dreams following the arrival of a new baby.