About Trusted Psychologists
A directory built by a working Clinical Psychologist, for the public to find regulated psychological care.
Founded by a Clinical Psychologist
Joanna Brook
HCPC-registered Clinical Psychologist
My name is Joanna Brook. I am a Chartered Consultant Clinical Psychologist, registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC PYL02753) and I founded Trusted Psychologists in 2026.
I qualified as a Clinical Psychologist in 1992. Most of my career has been spent in the NHS working in specialist tertiary services, including 25 years as a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and seven years as Head Psychologist for specialist services in an NHS Trust. Throughout that time, I also worked privately, providing therapy and expert assessment for clients in personal injury, trauma and occupational stress. In late 2023 I left the NHS to focus on my private practice, Nexus Psychological Services.
Across more than thirty years of clinical work, I have seen the same problem from two sides. As a senior NHS clinician, I sat on national commissioning groups making decisions about how mental health budgets are spent and how services are delivered. As a private therapist, I have seen what arrives at my door when those services fall short: people who have been in therapy with someone they trusted, often for months, and who have not been helped, sometimes worse.
In a meaningful number of those cases, the person providing therapy was not a regulated practitioner. They had used a title (therapist, counsellor, psychologist) that the public reasonably assumes signals training and accountability. In the UK, none of those titles requires either.
The gap this directory is built to address
In the United Kingdom, the title “Psychologist” is not legally protected. Anyone can use it. The same is true of “therapist”, “counsellor” and “psychotherapist”. A person can call themselves any of these things tomorrow with no qualification, no supervised training and no regulatory body.
The titles that ARE protected by law are protected through registration with the HCPC: Clinical Psychologist, Counselling Psychologist, Educational Psychologist, Forensic Psychologist, Health Psychologist, Occupational Psychologist, Sport and Exercise Psychologist, Practitioner Psychologist and Registered Psychologist. To use any of them legally, a practitioner must hold a recognised qualification, have completed approved postgraduate training, meet the HCPC’s standards of proficiency and remain bound by the HCPC’s standards of conduct, performance and ethics for as long as they practise.
Most members of the public do not know this distinction. When they search for a “Psychologist” or a “therapist” online, they assume that anyone holding themselves out under those titles has been trained and is accountable to a national regulator. Often, they have not been.
This matters most in the areas where psychological care can do the most harm if it goes wrong: trauma work, OCD, eating disorders, severe anxiety and depression, work with children and adolescents. These are the areas where evidence-based treatment, delivered by a clinician who has been specifically trained and is held to professional standards, is not a luxury. It is a duty of care.
How the directory is built
Trusted Psychologists is independent. It is not affiliated with HCPC, with the British Psychological Society, with any insurer, or with any therapy platform. It is funded by membership fees paid by listed Psychologists and takes no commission on enquiries or bookings. The relationship between a person seeking help and the Psychologist they choose is direct and unmediated.
Founding members of the directory are HCPC-registered Psychologists who joined ahead of public launch and shaped the platform alongside me. Their continued involvement, and their contribution to how the directory develops, is part of why the platform reflects how clinicians actually work, rather than how a venture-backed marketplace assumes we do.