About

Dr Catherine McCarthy provides clinical psychology services through Medicare and WorkCover (trauma treatment for emergency service workers only). Catherine is an EMDRIA and EMDRAA Consultant and EMDR Training Facilitator for EMDR level 1, level 2 and children and adolescent training. She is currently completing her credentialing to provide psychodynamic and relational therapies for disordered eating via Medicare.

Catherine trained both in Australia and the UK, completing her doctorate at the University of East London, where she trained and worked in secondary and tertiary care NHS teams. Catherine has a particular interest in working with mental health difficulties related to adversity, oppression, developmental trauma and neglect, including complex trauma, voice hearing, paranoia, unusual beliefs and dissociation. She also regularly provides intensive EMDR for recent events, prolonged adverse experiences and ongoing traumatic stress, including to frontline workers, such as emergency services, humanitarian, health and social care workers, journalists, foreign and war correspondents.

Catherine is a member of the Trauma Recovery Network and is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional Level 2: Complex Trauma. In 2025, Catherine started volunteering at Healing for Gaza, an emergency mental health crisis charity supporting Palestinian frontline workers, parents, orphans and amputees in Gaza and Cairo.

Alongside EMDR, Catherine also regularly uses imagery rescripting, nightmare rescripting, CBT, parts work (Internal Family Systems (IFS), schema, ego states), somatic, polyvagal, compassion focused, attachment, psychodynamic and relational approaches.

Catherine takes a systemic, political, cultural, social and neurobiological approach to the assessment and treatment of trauma, adversity and neglect. Her approach centres collaboration, building a strong therapeutic relationship to develop a shared formulation and treatment plan, informed by the British Psychological Society’s depathologising Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), critical human rights, and a decolonising and liberatory lens informed by the Social and Emotional Wellbeing (SEWB) (Dudgeon et al. 2021; Gee et al. 2014) and Marya’s (2018) frameworks.

Catherine has been committed to understanding trauma, recovery and post traumatic growth since witnessing her veteran parent successfully recover from PTSD in later life, as well as navigating her own mental health difficulties. Catherine is an Irish-Australian dual national who understands first hand the devastating impact of abuses of power, such as colonisation, on the individual, their families and communities and is passionate about supporting her clients on their road to recovery.