Meet the Team
Our team of highly qualified experts work together to bring you the best service possible, for you and your family.
Julianne Boutaleb
Consultant Perinatal Psychologist
Julianne is the Clinical Director and Founder of the Parenthood In Mind practice. She is a passionate and highly experienced perinatal psychologist who has worked for over 24 years in the NHS and private practice with parents and parents-to-be and their babies (and bumps) who have needed support with a wide variety of issues including anxiety and depression during and after pregnancy, miscarriage and reproductive loss, attachment issues, re-emergence of childhood issues and couples issues.
Dr Avital Pearlman
Chartered Clinical Psychologist
Avital is a certified Clinical Psychologist who has worked in child, family and perinatal settings for the past 8 years. She has a particular interest in supporting individuals and couples who have found that the journey to parenthood isn’t as they had imagined, and works together with them to understand the array of issues that can arise, including; difficulty conceiving, miscarriage and loss, anxiety during and after pregnancy, post-partum depression and complex emotions that arise within in the parent-infant attachment process.
Dr Helena Belgrave
Chartered Counselling Psychologist
Helena is a chartered counselling psychologist who specialises in perinatal issues. Alongside her work in the NHS in Tower Hamlets and Newham, where her role included perinatal assessments and therapy with mothers and mothers-to-be, Helena has always run her own private practice in South East London where she sees clients with perinatal concerns. Her perinatal work in the NHS has included working in primary and community care, as well as with women requiring longer term therapeutic support.
Dr Ruth Weiner
Clinical Psychologist
Ruth is an experienced clinical psychologist who has worked as a psychologist in the NHS for 23 years, in addition to working in private practice. She has worked in adult and maternal health for 18 years. She has worked with a range of difficulties in the perinatal period including pre conception support, adjustment to pregnancy and parenthood, anxiety and depression in both the antenatal and postnatal phase.
Dr Emily Ollman-Hirt
Counselling Psychologist & Psychotherapist
Emily is a counselling psychologist and psychotherapist, accredited by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapists. Emily recognises that having a baby comes with unique personal challenges to both parents individually, and as a couple. She also views this transitional time as a great opportunity for personal growth and change, and offers a space to understand what becoming a parent means for each individual, often taking into consideration the parent’s own early experiences of being parented.
Alex Costa
Psychological Therapist
Alex is a psychological therapist with 14 years experience of working in a range of health care settings within mental health. Alex has gained extensive perinatal experience since her first post as a nursing assistant on New Horizons, an inpatient Mother and Baby Unit in Bristol (Avon & Wiltshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust), where she supported mothers presenting with a range of psychiatric issues (postpartum psychosis, bipolar disorder, postnatal anxiety/OCD & depression) and their babies.
Dr Fiona Seth-Smith
Clinical Psychologist
Dr Fiona Seth-Smith is a senior member of the Parenthood in Mind team, and has been a Lead Clinical Psychologist in an NHS inpatient Mother and Baby Unit since 2008. She has over 20 years of experience with a range of adult mental health problems including trauma, psychosis, depression and OCD, and is expert in working with these issues as they present in the perinatal period. Fiona is trained in family and couple therapy, and in addition is highly experienced in supporting the parent-infant relationship in therapy.
Dr Elisabeth Rothaug-Smith
Clinical Psychologist
Elisabeth is a Chartered Clinical Psychologist with over ten years of experience working in the NHS, voluntary sector and more recently in private practice. She has a wealth of experience of working with children, adolescents and young adults in generic and specialist CAMHS settings. She works with the full range of clinical presentations, including anxiety, depression, OCD, trauma and post-traumatic stress, bereavement and loss, attachment and relationship difficulties, parenting, anger and self-esteem issues as well as gender identity difficulties.
Nadine Sylvester
Integrative Arts Psychotherapist
Nadine is an Integrative Arts Psychotherapist and has over 10 years’ experience working with individuals, couples and families. She specialises in offering therapy to individuals and couples struggling with anxiety, stress, depression, trauma, miscarriage, loss and bereavement as they manifest in the perinatal period. In addition, she can support clients who are thinking about starting a family from conception and beyond. She has a particular interest in cultural identity and religious or other difference, as well as transgenerational trauma in the perinatal period.
Carol Levine
Integrative Psychotherapist
Carol has over 20 years of experience of working therapeutically with children, adolescents and their parents in a CAMHS setting in London. In recent years, she has worked more intensively with parents in the perinatal period, having the opportunity to work during pregnancy and with parents and their babies post birth. In recognition of the importance of the new beginnings and the transition to parenthood, Carol works towards supporting individuals and couples through this sometimes joyful, sometimes complex and overwhelming period of life.
Dr Harriet Higgins
Chartered Clinical Psychologist
Harriet Higgins is an experienced Clinical Psychologist who has worked in the NHS for fifteen years in Adult and Child and Family mental health settings. She has a specialist interest in working with parents during pregnancy and in the early years of their children’s lives. She has experience of working with a wide range of difficulties including antenatal and postnatal depression/anxiety, fertility issues and perinatal loss, birth trauma, parenting difficulties, attachment issues and the resurfacing of childhood difficulties.
Dr Teresa Sarmiento
Clinical Psychologist
Teresa is a Clinical Psychologist and Parent Infant Psychotherapist, with over 15 years’ experience of working in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the NHS. Teresa is passionate about supporting mothers and fathers at such a crucial time in their lives, when becoming a parent can be exciting, but also challenging and overwhelming. She has extensive experience working with parents experiencing antenatal or postnatal depression, anxiety, difficulties adjusting to parenthood following a traumatic birth or a previous loss.
Dr Rose Spencer
Chartered Counselling Psychologist
Rose has over a decade of experience of working with adults, children and their families. Alongside her research and private practice, Rose works as a Perinatal Psychologist in the NHS in a mother and baby inpatient unit and community service. She has experience of working with parents with a range of difficulties, including anxiety, depression, psychosis, OCD and trauma. Rose has a specialist interest in attachment and perinatal mental health and working with families therapeutically to enhance the emotional wellbeing of parents and infants.
Dr Tracy Rydin-Orwin
Clinical Psychologist
Dr Tracy Rydin-Orwin is a senior member of the Parenthood in Mind Team and has been a Lead Clinical Psychologist for an NHS Perinatal Infant Mental Health Service for 12 years. She has over 15 years of experience working with a range of adult mental health difficulties including perinatal depression, anxiety, OCD and birth trauma.
Natasha Williams
BABCP Accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist and EMDR Practitioner
Natasha has over 20 years working with individuals, couples, children and their families. She started her career as a Social Worker and worked within Local authority Children services and as a senior manager within Safeguarding, Fostering, Adoption and Mental Health. Over the last 13 years, Natasha has worked as a qualified Psychotherapist both within NHS settings and in private practice.
Dr Nicola Jacyna
Chartered Clinical Psychologist
Nicola is a Clinical Psychologist and Parent Infant Psychotherapist who has worked for over 12 years in the NHS and is a senior clinician in an Early Years Team supporting parents and children under 5 years of age. She has experience of supporting parents with a range of presenting difficulties, both antenatally and postnatally including anxiety, depression, OCD, adjustment and ambivalence to parenthood, birth trauma, difficulties in bonding or the attachment relationship and working with bereavement and loss, including perinatal loss.
Dr Lindsay McMillan
Clinical Psychologist
Lindsay is a Clinical Psychologist working exclusively with parents to support parental emotional wellbeing. She has worked with the NHS, Social Care and in private practice for over 10 years. Lindsay helps parents to make sense of, cope with and navigate difficult and complex emotions in relation to different stages of parenthood. She is particularly interested in the adjustment process of becoming or being a parent and has a specialist clinical interest in Parental Gender Disappointment.
Dr Rachel Fraser
Perinatal Clinical Psychologist
Rachel is a thoughtful and compassionate clinician who has been working for 15 years with parents, couples, families and babies in and outside the NHS. Her practice centres around acknowledging both the wonders and the challenges of infancy, of pregnancy and parenting, and how they impact and shape our lives, sometimes in ways we haven’t realised. She has found that thinking these through in a safe, supportive environment helps empower parents, giving them newfound choice and agency- and crucially the opportunity to feel lightness and joy pregnancy, birth, parenthood and beyond.
Dr Michelle Tolfrey
Clinical Psychologist
Michelle is a Clinical Psychologist (HCPC Registered and BPS Chartered) with over twenty-one years of experience working in the NHS, Social Care and private practice. She has been fully qualified for fourteen years, during which time she has specialised in working with adults who have experienced trauma and loss. Michelle has undertaken further specialist training in multiple evidence-based therapies, including: Schema Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Compassion Focussed Therapy, Mentalisation Based Treatment and Single Session Therapy. She integrates these approaches to suit your specific needs.