Penny Cutting

Penny’s core profession is nursing, qualifying as a general nurse in 1987 and then as a psychiatric nurse in 1989. She became a UKCP registered integrative psychotherapist in 1999 and in 2011 after winning a fully funded scholarship completed a Masters in Clinical Research. She has a special interest in women’s mental health and set up and ran a service which offered an alternative to psychiatric hospital for women, for which she won the Kings Fund Award for Healthcare in London in 2001. She has worked as a clinician, nurse tutor, clinical service leader and psychotherapist both in acute psychosis services and since 2013 in specialist personality disorder services.

Currently she works part time as Trust Lead for MBT at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), the role involves, consultation and advice on pathways of care for people with symptoms associated with a diagnosis of personality disorder, supervision, training and development of clinicians in MBT and audit of the implementation of the MBT quality framework in Croydon, Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark. She chairs a regular special interest group for clinicians working with MBT in SLaM and has been involved in researching the experience of using an avatar software programme as an adjunct to MBT. In 2022 she joined Anna Freud as Co-Programme Director for the National MBT Adults Training Programme.

Clinically she offers individual, group and family MBT sessions at the Touchstone Service – a specialist  psychotherapy day hospital in Croydon. Recently, she co-produced a workshop with The Maudsley Recovery College called ‘Mentalizing – Using Compassionate Curiosity in Everyday Life’ and she has co-facilitated Families and Carers Training and Support groups based upon the research carried out by Professors Bateman and Fonagy in 2018.