Team members

Dr Farkhondeh Farsimadan

Farkhondeh (Farah) holds a Professional Doctorate (PsychD) in Counselling Psychology and has extensive experience working with refugees, asylum seekers, and migrant communities across a range of NHS services. These include several community mental health centres and inpatient settings such as a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), a women-only inpatient ward, and Assertive Outreach teams, all across West London.

Although she is now retired, Farah has supported refugees, asylum seekers, and migrant communities for over thirty years and remains deeply committed to related initiatives and causes. As part of this commitment, she has researched and developed the entire set of resources for CARE, which she updates regularly on a voluntary basis.

Serving on the BPS’s Presidential Taskforce on Refugees and Asylum Seekers, Farah helped develop the Guidelines for Psychologists Working with Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK, released by the Taskforce in 2018.

In 2019, Dr Farsimadan and Professor Tribe were jointly awarded the Division of Counselling Psychology Award for Diversity in Practice by the British Psychological Society.

Farah is passionate about and has contributed writings on the experiences of culturally diverse clients in therapy, the impact of ethnicity on therapeutic processes and outcomes, as well as the considerations necessary when working with refugee and asylum-seeking populations and interpreters in mental health.

In 2021, Farah authored a chapter titled Therapy and Therapeutic Considerations with Refugees and Asylum Seekers for the internationally edited book Mental Health, Mental Illness and Migration by Moussaoui et al. 

In 2022, she co-edited a special issue of the International Review of Psychiatry focused on Forced Migration and Mental Health. The following year, she co-edited another special issue titled Forced Migration: Psychosocial Services and Interventions, including the Role of Education, published in Displaced Voices: A Journal of Migration, Archives, and Cultural Heritage. 

More recently, Farah contributed a chapter entitled “Reflections of an interpreter working in mental health settings and the impact on her practice later as a counselling psychologist working in partnership with interpreters” to the second edition of Working with Interpreters in Mental Health, edited by Rachel Tribe, Kate Thompson, and Hitesh Raval and published by Routledge in 2026.