Psychology

The Psychological Medicine Unit at St Mark’s offers psychological assessment and management of patients being treated at the hospital, either as outpatients or during an inpatient stay. The unit has grown substantially and now receives up to 200 new referrals per year, both of patients currently being treated at St Mark’s and from other medical colleagues treating gastroenterology and coloproctology patients throughout the UK.

There is also a substantial commitment to teaching, research and to promoting a biopsychosocial model of understanding and managing complex medical conditions.

Typically patients are referred for an assessment with any of the senior staff members and then may be offered a referral onwards to local psychiatry or therapy services, ongoing supportive care, brief cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), hypnotherapy, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) or psychoanalytic psychotherapy.