Who We Are

Beam Consultancy is a unique organisation driven by clinicians and lived experience practitioners. We provide training, consultancy and intervention for those living and working with complex mental health issues. 

Beam was founded in response to the realisation that the NHS often struggles to work with those with complex mental health problems, particularly when these problems feature relationship difficulties, self harm and suicidality. 

Our team has considerable experience in mental health covering all areas from secure hospitals, PICUs, acute wards and a variety of generic and specialist community teams.  We are DBT therapists in addition to our core training.  Between us we combine Masters level study of Working with Personality Disorder, publications around working with complex presentations and leading workshops at national conferences.  We have won awards for delivering innovative services to complex client groups and are recognised as experts in our field.

Our Lived Experience Practitioners have received community and inpatient treatment both voluntarily and under the Mental Health Act.  They have experienced individual and group therapy as well as ECT and restraint.  Essentially, our experts have exceptional communication skills which allow them to share their experiences without staff feeling blamed or judged.  They have experience of delivering treatment as well as supervising staff.  They have delivered multiple training sessions with consistent excellent feedback and include award winners for presenting at national conferences.

Our partnership of professional and experiential expertise is a unique service with a proven record of success in psychologically containing staff and service users working/living with complex needs.

Our Services

Illumination - Training

Our experts with experience of delivering and receiving interventions offer fixed and bespoke sessions around topics such as; Potentially Lethal Self Harm, Suicidality, Personality Disorder, Trauma, and Developing Reflective Skills. 

We can create a tailored package to suit your individual needs.

Illumination - Consultancy

Significant complexity often leads to teams and individuals experiencing problems and feeling stuck.  Our supervision/thinking space sessions are facilitated by those who have worked with and lived with problems identified as extremely high risk. These help to unlock understanding and solutions inherent in our clients. 

We offer a risk assessment package to identify where more positive risk taking can take place and where service interventions can maintain or exacerbate issues.

We can work with your organisation to understand the barriers to working effectively and identify solutions to improve service user experience and reduce expenditure.

Support - Therapy

Depending on the client, we offer DBT or intensive goal focused therapy aimed at promoting autonomy and increasing quality of life.  Our lived experience practitioners can develop a rapport often inaccessible to professional staff. 

Our primary support package is aimed at helping people in their own environment.  We recognise the issues identified in the NICE guidelines around out of area placements and our Placement Avoidance package is designed to provide excellent care at an affordable rate without the trauma of leaving the client's social environment.

Training

All of our training packages are jointly created and delivered by those with clinical experience and lived experience of the subject matter.  While we are focused on meeting the needs of our clients, our preference is to avoid the dry delivery of facts and instead unlock the skills, knowledge and reflection staff need to perform and excel in their roles.

Working Effectively With People Diagnosed with Personality Disorder - 3 Days

A 3 day course focused on understanding the presentation often labelled as personality disorder.  We include the skills required to be effective, including specific approaches to collaborative working, formulation and managing crisis.  We aim to develop the reflective mindset essential for working with high risk clients while teaching the skills that our clinicians and service users have found to be effective. 

Skills for working with People Diagnosed with Personality Disorder- 1 day

An abridged 1 day version of the above 3 day course with specific focus on the importance of building relationships, collaborative working, deescalation, interpersonal dynamics, validation, problem solving and effectively utilising DBT techniques. 

Working with potentially lethal self harm - 2 Days

This 2 day course specialises in understanding and working with potentially lethal self harm. With emphasis on harm reduction, risk management without being risk adverse, and how to provide psychological containment for both clinicians and clients.  This is delivered  from a unique perspective of a client's frame of reference to understand the underlying reasons for 'maladaptive' ways of coping.

managing crisis presentations of suicidality and severe self harm - 1 day

A 1 day course concentrating on effectively managing crisis by understanding what is behind the presentation; illuminating what is being communicated by clients and sometimes reflected back by teams. There is a focus on developing skills to provide psychological containment for both clinicians and clients in emotionally charged situations and effectively utilising de-escalation techniques and risk management. Sessions will cover validation, problem solving and a range of skills to employ including 'When nothing seems to work'.

Why it all makes sense: Formulating Behaviour that causes problems - 1 day

Understanding how early life and past experiences are reaffirmed and play out in the present. Using theory that is accessible and understandable for all levels of staff, we will jointly create a narrative to facilitate insight and aid problem solving.

An introduction to mental health - 1 day

A brief overview of mental health generally; exploring wellness and illness, diagnosis, dispelling myths, and common interventions used within primary and secondary services.  How you can help and how to refer on.

Restraint: The power of being held - 1 day

Exploring psychologically informed ways of minimising the use of restraint within inpatient facilities using effective communication and de-escalation with attention paid to a client's previous experiences and how those are played out in the present.. 

Thinking the unthinkable - Various

A facilitated discussion that examines and deconstructs established wisdom.  Often used in a conference setting or as a team away day this gives staff the opportunity to play with concepts that are difficult to articulate in the workplace.  Previous topics have included "Why are People with Personality Disorder so Manipulative", "Let's Allow Self Harm on the Ward" and "Personality Disorder is not our Business".  We can create an engaging and lively debate that is relevant to you.

Bespoke Training Solutions - Various

You know your organisation best and we are eager to hear your training needs and respond to them.  We are confident in our skills and experience in working with highly complex and high risk clients, however we are humble enough to direct you to other services if that expertise is located elsewhere.  Feel free to contact us to discuss your needs and how we might meet them.

Facilitated Meetings/Away Days

Our presence can help teams in new ways and our Experts by Experience are adept at helping clinicians express ideas they might normally articulate.  By working on what people think, as opposed to what they want people to think they think, teams are more able to address the issues facing them.  We offer bespoke sessions or can facilitate entire days of team building and reflection.

Consultancy

When working with human beings, the emotional impact of caring for those who find it hard to accept care can be profound.  Often our clientele have been let down, neglected and/or abused by those who might have been expected to protect them.  This leads to difficulties in their ongoing relationships with health professionals.

Individual/Team Supervision

A regular space to discuss the difficulties of the work, the impact on the staff and service user and essentially, a plan of action to move forward.  Jointly facilitated by our expert clinicians and experts by experience, the sessions promote an empathic understanding of difficulties, and focus on thoughtful responses based on facts rather than traditional thoughts or prescribed beliefs.

Complex Case discussion

A stand alone case conference to identify the goals, risks, learning opportunities and ways forward for teams and clients who are particularly stuck.  Our service user consultants help to bring an authentic understanding of challenging presentations and the potential impact and interpretations of what we consider care.  These sessions are aimed at developing a more nuanced understanding of complexity, building a team formulation and using this as the basis for further decision making. 

Independent assessment and risk formulation

It is our firm belief that the knowledge and solutions for working with complex clients lie within the treating team.  On occasion teams benefit from a new perspective to enrich their understanding of their client.  We offer a review of clinical notes, interview with the client and a risk formulation based on what is likely to occur consistent with previous actions and opposed to basing interventions on the worst possible scenario.  We focus on the client's strengths, safety behaviours, capacity to make decisions and potential for long term improvement verses short term relief.  From this we can outline a strategy for ongoing treatment that allows the client to retain autonomy while maintaining coping methods that are potentially harmful.  Often interventions aimed at keeping people safe can inadvertently lead to increased self harm and potentially higher risk of death. 

Organisational Observation & Consultation

At times staff are aware that there are difficulties in their environment but find it hard to articulate them so that they can be worked on.  This can lead to splits in the team, locating problems in individuals or increased sickness and burnout.  This package involves our experts spending time to observe, speak to those in the environment and feedback observations in a way the team can understand and action. 

Support

We passionately believe that a live worth living is built in the client's local community.  All of the NICE guidelines' personal accounts talk of people going to various placements only to relapse when they return to home.  Our interventions are aimed at people with significant levels of self harm and perceived high risk of suicide and prioritise doing things via negotiation and consent while avoiding coercion and control.

Placement Avoidance

This package is based on the NICE recommended therapy DBT, and prioritises reducing potentially lethal behaviour, maintaining a therapeutic relationship and building a life worth living.  Our intensive psychological containment model offers twice weekly sessions combined with 24 hour telephone support.  We will help our clients to use the services around them effectively while providing the majority of their therapeutic contact.

Our team have experience of working effectively and informally in the community with those who it was felt that compulsory out of area therapy was the only option.  In addition we have successfully transitioned people from secure units to the community where there were strong views that only compulsory detention could be provided.  Our clinicians and Experts by Experience are keenly aware of the effects of iatrogenic harm - where what is done for the best results in maintaining/exacerbating problems, and we will work intensively with teams and clients to minimise these dynamics.

Where clients are unable to commit to DBT we offer a similarly intensive, goal focused intervention based around Structured Clinical Management.  This is an approach with a comparable evidence base to DBT but without the requirement to give up self harm.  We would work with clients to build a life worth living incorporating their views about their essential coping mechanisms.  In the past our support has moved clients off wards where placement was considered the sole option, to over a year in the community receiving our support without admission.

While we are confident that we provide an effective, ethical and evidence based service our unique selling point is that we will deliver consensual, collaborative care at a fraction of the cost of enforced residential treatment.

 Our Results

We support people who recurrently self harm and feel that life is not worth living. Often they are stuck in acute hospital wards and/or at risk of going to self declared specialist units. Below are bed days used by those that we worked with before and during our time working together. Its likely that we’ve underestimated the bed days pre our input.

What people who have worked with us say?

“Beam is a life changing support network, when all treatments have failed and this being the last resort 100% take the opportunity if you don't try you will never know! initial starts are the hardest but you will get through it! The beginning is hard as you go on you will see a massive difference. I would not be where I am today achieving my goals without their support. Determination is key! works both ways you putting in the effort to make changes to get well otherwise its pointless.  BEAM are people that want the best for you and with all the expertise they sure do a good job better than actual NHS CMHT WORKERS. They’re people you can speak to at 9pm when your sat crying on a hospital bed trying to help you piece yourself together. Help you in ways hospital cannot. 100% give it a go, always, coming from someone who wanted to give up multiple times”

“For the people who are considering working with BEAM, I highly recommend it. Its taught me so much about myself and the support is extraordinary. They have been the most useful and supportive professionals in my life and have gotten me through so much. Sometimes doing a new form of therapy can be scary, but both Keir and Hollie make it fun and will help you to understand it much better. They always have your best interest in mind and will do anything they can to help. Their extended phone contact is useful if you struggle more out of working day hours and are honestly there when you need them. They keep to their promises and won't give up, and will always work with you and encourage you to be the best self you can be”

“I wish I could write something that will transform someone’s thinking and turn things around for them.  If I had read a motivational and reassuring patient testimony at the height of my difficulties, I would have most likely screwed it up and thrown it away. To think there was hope outside of the toxic cycle I had found myself in seemed unrealistic, I would scoff at those motivational posters that ironically decorated the hospital walls and yet here I am trying to share the message that there IS HOPE. If this message does reach someone like me then please know that this life is worth living and things can get better if you want them to. I think the key is to want the change. As soon as you can begin to make sense of that want, and to then actualise that motivation to live a more fulfilled life then you will see such a difference. Trust in Hollie and Keir but most importantly trust in yourself.”

“I was told “You mustn’t work for at least a couple of years.” “You should stay away from the pressures of work as it could contribute to your feelings of inadequacy …” “You might not be able to cope.”  Not once did anyone acknowledge that I was good at my job. It was never appreciated that I had worked from the age of 12 and that I thrived off the autonomy and responsibility  it gave me. No one ever considered that working was massively part of my positive self-concept and that by denying me this one thing, it was denying me the hope and optimism that things could be better and return to some new kind of normal in the world outside the ward. What I was being told simply reinforced the feelings of inadequacy and failure that I had been trying to break away from during my admission.  I was devastated.

Something else I was told needed to happen was: “You must take away all the knives in the house.”… “Lock all the windows.” Wow, in retrospect I now see how unhelpful this was. I was sent home with an enormous fear of anything that could potentially cause me harm. This fear only heightened by these normal household items being hidden away. Its like the monster under the bed is for a child, the fear is in the unknown. Are they there? Will they hurt me? Again this instruction left me feeing weak and incapable. Why was I sent home with no one giving me the confidence that I could manage, being told everything I should avoid or get rid of just in order to cope day to day?

Keir and Hollie worked so hard to help me rebuild self-belief and trust that had been so badly damaged by others.  

At the point of BEAM being mentioned and starting to come into the picture I had been in hospital for many months and the ward was the most unsettled and distressing it had ever been. I was physically and mentally drained, dosing up to the maximum on PRN medication, isolated from family because of COVID restrictions and using anything I could find to harm myself. I was at a point of total hopelessness and exhaustion and so I didn’t have the energy to get excited about this new service being offered to me. I was told that it was a specialist service with a  phone line, a DBT program and a lived experience practitioner. I really want to say that I was excited and hopeful but I wasn’t. At this point it was just another possibility. Previous options hadn’t worked out so why would this one? And if they are as brilliant and specialist as people say they are then why on earth would they select me to receive this help? I didn’t feel deserving. In all honesty I had 0% faith that this referral would result in anything.

What was most useful and worrying at the same time was your persistence. I had become very good at getting out of difficult meetings on the ward, storming out, telling staff to fuck off and in time this meant that difficult discussions weren’t had. However, BEAM came along and would meet with me without fail. No matter the upset they would continue to come and see me which no one had ever done before. Mindfulness practice was so hard in the beginning, my intrusive thoughts would relish the opportunity to take over the second I would sit quietly and tune into them. In all honesty it felt like torture.  But Keir persevered and every session we would engage in mindfulness practice without fail, so useful but equally as worrying for me in the beginning.  

Choosing BEAM was a decision  based on  an accumulation of many factors. For wish of a better word, the ward was becoming crazier and I was finding that the time I spent with Hollie and Keir was the only hour of peace and reflection I was getting in the week. I was insight into what I could possibly have outside. Don’t get me wrong, our sessions were hard. I would get upset, cross, frustrated but that is exactly the point…It allowed me the precious time and space to be upset, cross and frustrated and to truly feel, experience and express. I gradually came to realise how precious that was and how much I anticipated our sessions. I was genuinely in awe of your knowledge and understanding which was another factor in my decision to choose BEAM. Both Hollie and Keir were able explain things in such straight forward and simple terms, things that I had battled for years to find the words to explain. This gave me a real sense of comfort and safety. Yes of course there was also a real sense of no other option. I was at a point where I’d exhausted all ways of harming myself on the ward and nothing had fixed things for me, a specialist unit wouldn’t help me and the thought of being on the ward for another year would be my worst nightmare. I’d rather die than stay in my current situation.   For the first time, in possibly forever, I had professionals interested in my voice and mine alone. Until now, the wishes of my partner and family were so significant and dictated the choices I made. My first several ward rounds took place without me.  To be in charge of my own therapy was a change that I didn’t realise how badly was needed and was another reason why I chose BEAM. I felt that for the first time it was something just for me.

I instantly felt an ease in Hollie’s company. She had explained that she had previously been in and out of hospital but we never discussed anything further … we didn’t need to. I knew that she knew exactly what I was going through. To sit opposite someone who had been through the same and yet was so composed, insightful and compassionate was inspiring and proved to me it was do-able. Hollie continues to be an inspiration for me.

I understood that Keir had an OT background, but I feel it was his general character that made more of a difference. Keir carries with him the most incredible aura of calm which was refreshing. So much of the time, mental health professionals present as authoritative, aloof, and clinical so to be in the company of someone with so much knowledge and yet so approachable and warm made a significant difference in me feeling able to engage. For both Hollie and Keir, their expertise in this area was so evident from the beginning purely through the language they would use. Both would help me unpick what I was thinking and help place the appropriate label to it. Their extensive emotional vocabulary specific to my difficulties and needs helped me understand what I was thinking and feeling more than ever before.

Something that really stands out would be how you were so willing to be present during my upset or panic attacks.  On the ward, when feeling extremely distressed you were often left alone with instructions to “calm down”. Staff would say that someone in a real state couldn’t be reasoned with. This made me feel so abandoned and unworthy. But with Beam, Hollie and Kier would stay, talk me through a panic, allow me the time to cry.

That being said, looking back, I think meeting with you may have been what caused the change in me on the ward. By that I mean my destructive behaviour, the intensity of my anxiety attacks became less. Perhaps I didn’t need to prove that I was struggling anymore, because there were two people who “got me”, who had empathy as well as faith. Having a tangible, black and white report that detailed so many of the reasons for my struggling gave me that concrete validation I needed. It wasn’t just words spoken and then forgotten, they were down on paper in black and white which I could hold and read and by doing so allow myself that little bit of empathy I had refused myself until then.”

We are based mainly in the Wirral/Cheshire area but are willing to deliver services across the country

Contact Us

Our inbox in monitored throughout the day and we aim to reply within 2 hours at a minimum.   If there are issues with the contact form email us direct at

Keir@beamconsultancy.co.uk