GALLERY - ACT Now Purposeful Living

Dr Sarah Cassidy
B.Sc. (Hons.) Psych., Ph.D., Prof. Cert. CBT, Cert. Adv. ACT & MBI, C. Psychol. Ps.S.I.

Dr Sarah Cassidy is an Educational, Child & Adolescent Psychologist, a Peer Reviewed ACT Trainer, the Founder and Director of Smithsfield Clinic, and Co-Founder and Co-Director of New England Centre for OCD & Anxiety, Ireland Branch. Sarah also co-founded and is Chief Education Officer at RaiseYourIQ.com, a Maynooth University based campus company conducting cutting edge educational technological research using SMART training. Her many other roles include lecturing, training and researching in Child, Educational and Counselling Psychology from the CBS perspective in universities, health service executive, public and private organizations and clinics. She has authored numerous peer reviewed scientific articles in RFT and more recently, two best-selling ACT children’s books in the Tired of Anxiety series with co-author, Dr. Lisa Coyne.

Prof. Louise McHugh
B.A. (Hons.) Psych., Ph.D.

Prof. Louise McHugh is Professor of Psychology at University College Dublin and a leading expert in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Prof. McHugh is a peer-reviewed ACT trainer and a Fellow of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. Prof. McHugh has published over 100 papers on her topics of expertise, and she is also the author of two books: A Contextual Behavioral Guide to the Self and The Self and Perspective Taking. Her work has received funding from a number of prestigious sources, such as the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Waterloo Trust and the Welsh Assembly.

Louise is a long-suffering Mayo supporter and budding improv comedian.

Dr Patti Robinson
Ph.D.

Dr Patti Robinson is currently the Director of Training and Program Evaluation for Mountainview Consulting Group. This company was founded in 1998 and won the APA Presidential Innovative Practice Award in 2009. Dr. Robinson is the co-founder of the Primary Care Behavioral Health model and Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. She provides consultation and training services all over the world and is committed to improving access to behavioral health services and to the realization of health equity. Earlier in her career, she worked as a researcher and clinician for Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, WA, and as a Behavioral Health Consultant for Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic in Toppenish, WA.

She has over 50 professional publications and eleven books, including “In This Moment: Five Steps to Transcending Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroscience” and “Real Behavior Change in Primary Care“.

Dr Janina Scarlet
M.A., Ph.D.

Dr Janina Scarlet is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, a scientist, and a full-time geek. A Ukrainian-born refugee, she survived Chernobyl radiation and persecution. She immigrated to the United States at the age of 12 with her family and later, inspired by the X-Men, developed Superhero Therapy to help patients with anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

She has written multiple publications on this topic and has given talks domestically and internationally. She is also a member of the Pop Culture Hero Coalition. She is the author of “Dark Agents”, “Supernatural Therapy”, “Super-Women”, “Superhero Therapy”, “Therapy Quest”, and “Harry Potter Therapy“. On October 27th, 2018, Dr. Scarlet was awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights award from the United Nations Association for her work with the refugee community and her unique approach to therapy.

For more on Dr. Scarlet, see her website.

Dr Kirk Strosahl
Ph.D.

Dr Kirk Strosahl is one of the founders of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and specializes in the application of ACT as a brief intervention. He has practiced for 30 years in a variety of brief intervention contexts, including brief therapy clinics and primary care. He has written several professional books on the brief applications of ACT, including “Brief Interventions for Radical Change: Principles and Practice of Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” and “Inside This Moment: Promoting Radical Change in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy”. In 2018, with Dr. Patricia Robinson, he co-authored the second edition of their best-selling self-help book, “The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression: Using ACT to Move Through Depression and Live a Vital Life”.

Dr. Strosahl has conducted numerous training workshops around the world; his approach to teaching is clinician oriented and skill-based. Because of this, Dr. Strosahl has often been referred to as the “hands of ACT”.

Dr Evelyn Gould
Ph.D., BCBA-D

Dr Evelyn Gould is a Clinical Behavior Analyst and Licensed Psychologist at The New England Center for OCD and Anxiety (NECOA). She is also a Clinical Associate at the Child and Adolescent OCD Institute (OCDI-Jr) at McLean Hospital, and Research Associate in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Evelyn has two decades of experience working with families of children with autism, OCD, and other learning and behavior challenges across settings. Evelyn is also actively involved in research and has published articles and book chapters on parent training, clinical assessment and treatment design, and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) for practitioners and parents of children with ASD.

She is passionate about the dissemination of evidence-based behavioral interventions and passionate about promoting social justice and addressing issues of diversity and equity within Behavior Analysis. Evelyn is actively involved in a variety of Special Interest Groups and Task Forces within the ABAI and ACBS communities and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science.

Joanna Siadul
M.Sc.

Joanna Siadul is a professional coach, specializing in career and wellness coaching. She first learned about contextual-behavioral science through the One-Year Advanced Course in Acceptance & Commitment Therapy and Mindfulness-based Interventions. Since then, for the past four years, she has been assisting in the running and facilitation of various types of psychology workshops with ACT Now Purposeful Living.

Joanna completed Masters in Personal and Management Coaching (UCC), and BA in Pedagogy, specializing in Social Work. She is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council.

Since 2015, she has coached internationally, working with clients from Ireland, Poland, and the UK. She uses ACT as a cornerstone of her evidence-based approach to coaching. She works with individuals who struggle with work stress and she helps them to create a career worth getting out of bed for. Currently, she works for Business in the Community as a Job Coach. She enjoys facilitating workshops focusing on mindfulness skills, resilience, personal and work values, wellbeing, and self-confidence.

In her spare time, Joanna likes to go to parks and admire all the dogs she can spot. On a rainy day, you will find her on her couch reading another mindfulness book.

Dr. Patricia Zurita Ona
Psy.D.

Dr. Zurita Ona, Dr. Z, is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in California. Her clinical work started first as a school psychologist and then as a clinical psychologist. She has significant experience working with children, adolescents, and adults with OCD, trauma, anxiety, and emotional regulation problems. Dr. Z’s clinical work was initially focused on emotion regulation in response to the different clinical settings she was delivering services; because of her passion on acceptance-based processes, she contributed to the literature on emotion regulation by publishing two self-help books for parents and adults respectively, and an academic workbook for clinicians. Over the last 14 years, Dr. Z has been learning, practicing, and teaching Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and is passionate about its application to specific struggles such as perfectionism, procrastination, OCD, anxiety and related conditions.

As Dr. Z’s career evolved she created a clinical setting to fully pursue her passion: fear-based struggles. Dr. Z is the founder of the East Bay Behavior Therapy Center, a boutique therapy practice, where she runs an intensive outpatient program integrating Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) to support clients getting stuck from obsessions, fears, anxieties and worries; figure out what they care about, and do the stuff that matters to them.

Dr. Z attends local, national, and international conferences on a regular basis in order to keep up with current clinical research and deliver up-to-date therapy services to her clients. In addition to her doctoral training, Dr. Z has been nominated as a Fellow of the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science; she’s a graduate of the International OCD foundation Behavior Therapy Training Institute (BTTI) for the treatment of pediatric OCD and adult OCD.

Dr. Z ‘s recent publications include The ACT Workbook for Teens with OCD: Unhook Yourself and Live Life to the Full and Living beyond OCD using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A workbook for adults.