Rory Bolton

Rory Bolton is a registered Mental Health Nurse since 1996, and a British Psychoanalytic Council registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist since 2010 and Dynamic Interpersonal Therapist since 2018.

He worked as a clinician within the Halliwick Personality Disorder Service between 1996 and 2015, where he participated in the research studies and the development of the Mentalisation-Based Therapy (MBT) approach under the direction of Professor Anthony Bateman. With Professor Bateman, Rory co-facilitated the first pilot of an adapted MBT approach for individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder and associated long-standing difficulties in managing aggression. He was the clinical and operational manager of Personality Disorder Services across the Trust between 2008 and 2015, where he oversaw the setting up of satellite specialist services in the boroughs of Enfield and Barnet.

Between 2015 and 2022 Rory was clinical and operational lead for the psychotherapy services in City and Hackney for East London Foundation NHS Trust, and became the lead for psychological therapies across secondary care services in the borough between 2017 and 2022. He was latterly leading the transformation of psychological services to align with place-based primary care networks as part of the NHS Community Transformation Programme. Between 2015 and 2022, Rory was chairperson of an innovative Psychological Therapies and Wellbeing Alliance of statutory and non-statutory providers of psychological interventions across the borough of City & Hackney.

Rory has been an associate trainer on the basic and practitioner training courses in MBT run through Anna Freud since 2010, and he is experienced in supervising specialist personality disorder services in the application of MBT across NHS secondary care, private hospital and offender pathway settings since 2010. He was one of the clinical supervisors for the Mentalization for Offending Adult Males (MOAM) national clinical trial commissioned by the Ministry of Justice. More recently, he has been supervising a pilot intervention for a Trauma-Focused adaptation of MBT. He has also been gaining experience in the training, supervision, research and delivery of an adapted MBT Parenting intervention developed by Gerry Byrne, known as the MBT Lighthouse Parenting Programme. Prior to his career in psychiatry he completed a PhD in biological research, where he obtained a grounding in empirical research methodology.