Hi, I am Dr Rima Lamba and I'm the Clinical Director and Founder of Blue River Psychology. I'm a qualified Counselling Psychologist, Chartered with the British Psychological Society (BPS) and Registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).

 

I have 12 years experience (including training years) and up until recently I worked as a Senior Clinician and Lead Psychologist in an all-age community eating disorders service. Now I work purely in private practice, which involves developing Blue River Psychology as a service geared towards empowering women, with a specialist interest in culture, race, patriarchy, health, power and oppression, maternal wellbeing and reproductive health.

 

I have developed my skills and knowledge by working in a variety of different settings, including the NHS, voluntary and charity sector, higher education and private practice. I have worked with common mental health difficulties as well as more complex difficulties. I have worked across the lifespan and I particularly enjoy working with young women in adolescence grappling with issues around life goals, identity and values. I also have a keen interest in clinical health as a result of the time I spent at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, during my doctoral training placement. Here I worked in the heart of London at INPUT Pain Management Unit in St. Thomas' Hospital. To this day, I am interested in how human beings adjust to health diagnoses and manage symptoms and change that comes with an illness.  

If you are on this website, you have probably already gauged how my work is informed by a variety of psychological theories and models and therefore I work integratively. The key models which inform my thinking and clinical practice are attachment theory, psychodynamic, feminist concepts, and research on culture and ethnicity. The latter stems from my own personal experience of being a British South Asian female and having to navigate myself between what seemed like two cultural identities, the British in me and the South Asian in me, and then coming to a point of realising my own individual identity sits combining these two cultures within me. Growing up between the pull of these cultures brought unique and diverse challenges, which ultimately shaped me to be who I am personally and professionally. As a result of my own experiences I am naturally interested in how culture, ethnicity and racial identity shapes us as individuals, but I am particularly interested in how these concepts might coincide with the challenges of being a woman and/or mother. 

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My interest in culture and ethnicity, was further reinforced by my work as I have had opportunities to work with diverse and multi-cultural client groups. My work at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), a University of London collegiate, provided a chance to work with mainly international students, majority of whom were from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and USA. This experience, allowed me to gain exposure of working with global mental health issues.

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My doctoral thesis allowed me the creative opportunity to bring together my interest in culture and maternal mental health as I explored migrant Pakistani-Muslim women’s lived experiences of postnatal depression. This set forth my interest in perinatal mental health and reproductive psychology and through my clinical work I have had the chance to work with women who have experienced postnatal depression, re-emergence of attachment and trauma issues during the motherhood journey, baby gender preference, baby loss, infertility and more.

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I am deeply passionate about the issues facing girls, women and mothers today in our society. I continue to remain open in my  therapeutic style and adapt the therapeutic framework in line with clients’ needs, whilst remaining mindful of research evidence for the best psychological approach.