Adversity and Violence: Exploring the Connections - with Gwen Adshead

A free online learning session with Gwen Adshead, forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist, exploring the links between adversity and violence.

This is an area that’s well recognised in the evidence base and in practice, but one we haven’t yet tackled directly – so a valuable session for anyone working with complexity and risk.

About Dr Gwen Adshead

Dr Gwen Adshead has spent her career trying to understand the psychological mechanisms that give rise to violence. She was a Consultant Psychotherapist at Broadmoor Hospital from 1998, and has also worked in prisons, medium-secure units and the community. She has published several academic books and over one hundred papers on forensic psychotherapy, moral reasoning and ethics, and attachment theory. She is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Devil You Know, and gives regular lectures nationally and internationally, including as a visiting professor at Yale and Gresham College. 

Why this session

This session is an invitation to look honestly at violence and aggression, without minimising the harm it causes to victims, families and communities, while staying open to the adversity, attachment disruption and trauma that so often sit underneath it. That’s not a comfortable place to stand, and it isn’t about excusing behaviour or diluting accountability. It’s about practitioners having the confidence and the frameworks to ask why, so that risk can be understood as well as managed – a perspective that’s well established in the evidence base but rarely given dedicated space in training. This session offers that space, we hope you’ll join us.

If you are interested in attending please click on the link below to register you attendance:

Adversity and Violence: Exploring the Connections – with Gwen Adshead