APAS Seminar Series – Rachel Gibbons

Impossibility of Working in Organisations – Institutional Harm and the Loss of Truth

This talk explores how organisations exposed to unbearable human realities can lose their capacity to think, tell the truth, and care. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and clinical experience, it examines how unconscious anxiety hardens into organisational terror, giving rise to defensive cultures of blame, scapegoating, and ritualised accountability. Through case examples from healthcare and mental health services, the talk traces how organisational harm is produced by systems struggling to manage grief, uncertainty, and responsibility. It concludes by considering what makes mitigation possible.

Dr Rachel Gibbons Biography

Dr Rachel Gibbons is a consultant psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, group analyst, and organisational consultant with over 20 years’ experience working across complex healthcare systems. Much of her work focuses on understanding and mitigating organisational harm arising in settings exposed to extreme anxiety, trauma, and moral injury.

She is Vice Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Chair of the College’s Working Group on the Impact of Suicide and Homicide on Clinicians, having previously chaired its Patient Safety Group. Her national leadership has shaped policy and practice on the emotional, ethical, and systemic consequences of adverse events in healthcare.

Dr Gibbons developed two national guidance documents on the pastoral care of clinicians affected by patient suicide and homicide, now embedded within England’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy (2023). She also co-edited Seminars in the Psychotherapies (RCPsych, 2021), a core text in psychiatric training.

Her academic and clinical writing spans suicide and self-harm, psychodynamic psychiatry, organisational defences, and the psychological impact of blame and scapegoating following tragedy. She has published widely and collaborated with leading national and international researchers, including Professor Keith Hawton and the Oxford Centre for Suicide Research. Alongside this, she co-founded and continues to facilitate a long-standing peer support group for consultant psychiatrists affected by suicide and homicide.

Dr Gibbons has worked across inpatient, community, liaison, and forensic settings, including the Halliwick Unit and the Portman Clinic, and was formerly National Therapy Director at the Priory Group. Her organisational work draws on deep psychoanalytic training at the Tavistock, the Institute of Psychoanalysis, and the Institute of Group Analysis, integrating clinical insight with systems-level consultation.

In 2024, she was awarded the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ President’s Medal in recognition of her outstanding contribution to public knowledge, education, policy, and patient care in mental health.

Further resources and writing can be found at www.drrachelgibbons.co.uk.

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Details

When: Thursday 28 May 2026, 8.00pm (Sydney time)

Where: Online via Zoom

Recordings will be available for two weeks after the presentation

Cost: $88 (GST included)

Discounts available for full-time students

Bookings will open soon