Getting to know the faculty committee - Camilla Rosan

And although I will know many of you already (perinatal psychology is a small world), I would love to take a moment to introduce myself both personally and professionally. 

So a little bit about me. I am 39, I live on the coast in East Kent in England, and am married to a man I have been with for fifteen years. We are parents to two little people – our youngest is 10 months old (Albie) and we also have an older 7 year old (Ella). So I am officially in the perinatal period still myself.  

My journey to becoming a parent, like so many of us, wasn't a straight forward one and involved lots of bumps in the road with fertility treatment and multiple losses. Pregnancy, when I got there, was also very difficult and fraught with hyperemesis, severe pelvic girdle pain and pre-eclampsia. And although I somehow seemed to muddle through the ups and downs of early parenting - neither me nor my partner have family to help out, so it was very often quite an isolating experience. I share this as I try to intentionally lean into these experiences to inform my perinatal psychology practice, but also to think about how I can influence improving the wider system. I try to do this in lots of ways – including being an active service user in my local Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership - but it is one of the reasons I am so excited to be the new chair of the Faculty and hope to use this leadership role to affect as much change as possible. 

So what do I do in my day job? I worked as a sex therapist and researcher before I trained as a clinical psychologist and have always been hugely interested in working with couples relationally – so this is a strong theme in all my perinatal practice. My career up to this point has been a little bit untraditional in lots of ways as I have worked for quite a few charities (NSPCC, Mental Health Foundation, Maternal Mental Health Alliance) and for the government focusing more on service development and transformation than delivering direct clinical therapy. 

I am now a consultant clinical psychologist and researcher for a national family mental health charity called Anna Freud, which I absolutely love. I lead a large team of experts by experience, clinical researchers and students who are involved in perinatal and early childhood research. We are particularly interested in delivering research that women and NHS clinicians say they want and need, and policy makers have also identified as an important practice gap in the evidence-base. 

We have a specialist interest in a number of areas: (a) how to identify who needs help, and when, in their journey to becoming a parent; (b) supporting the psychological needs of women and their partners following early pregnancy loss; (c) supporting the parent-infant and/or couple relationship when one of the parents has mental health difficulties; and (d) supporting the psychological needs of women following physical health difficulties occurring as a result of pregnancy and/or birth. And we do this mainly through NIHR funded research that involves developing, adapting and testing psychological assessments and interventions in the perinatal period. One of our biggest projects in the team at the moment is the  COSI study , which is testing the clinical and cost effectiveness of the Circle of Security-Parenting intervention in perinatal mental health services in a large randomised controlled trial.