Published: October 2026

Keywords:
Critical psychiatry | psychiatric diagnoses | rigour and imagination.

Carmen García Pérez de León

Carmen García Pérez de León is a Lecturer in Family Therapy Education in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at King's College London, where she teaches across the Graduate Certificate and MSc programmes in Systemic Family Therapy. She has been a member of King's academic staff since 2014, initially as an Academic Tutor in Systemic Family Therapy and, since 2022, as Lecturer in Family Therapy Education.

Alongside her academic role, Carmen is a Highly Specialist Systemic Family Therapist at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, integrating teaching, clinical practice, supervision and research. Her academic work explores contemporary developments in systemic and relational practice, with particular interests in learning processes, therapist development, risk-taking in education, collaborative practice, critical philosophy, and emerging posthumanist and new materialist perspectives in mental health and psychotherapy. She is currently completing a PhD at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS), Dublin.

Her areas of expertise include:

• Systemic and Family Therapy
• Family Therapy Education and Training
• Clinical Supervision
• Mental Health in Children, Young People and Families
• Reflective and Experiential Learning
• Complex Trauma and EMDR-informed Practice
• Collaborative and Dialogical Approaches
• Systemic Theory and Critical Philosophy
• Risk, Crisis and Uncertainty in Therapeutic Practice

Prior teaching appointments include work as an External Lecturer for the Anna Freud Centre, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, and Maudsley International, including international teaching in the United Arab Emirates. She has also delivered specialist training for education, health and social care professionals across NHS and local authority services.

Her qualifications include a Degree in Philosophy and Education from the University of Valencia, an MSc in Family Therapy and Graduate Certificate in Family Therapy from King's College London, a Postgraduate Diploma in Systemic Supervision and Training from the University of Bedfordshire, specialist qualifications in clinical hypnosis and Ericksonian hypnotherapy, accreditation as an EMDR therapist, and Senior Fellowship of Advance HE.

Carmen has published widely in the fields of systemic psychotherapy, therapeutic learning, professional development and mental health. Her publications have appeared in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, Murmurations, Context, and the International Journal of Collaborative Practices.

Abstract

In the backdrop of systemic family therapists' engagement with critical perspectives on the meaning(s) of mental health and how these inform practice developments, this rendering is neither scientific nor systematic, but an invitation to exercise our imagination around our relationship with certain nomenclatures, diverting from the generally accepted definitions and uses (i.e., applications) of some mental health diagnoses. The invitation is to divert from a comprehensive intent of classification to aid diagnostic processes, without presenting this diversion as an alternative to such frameworks. I propose a few examples with a sense of lightness applied to words that tend to present themselves in conversations loaded with heavy meanings. Tourette syndrome, ASD, ADHD, depression, OCD and psychosis are explored here from the perspective of possibilities that the patterns receiving these names point at, if considered in relationship with other contextual levels, different from the ones normally connected to the way we make sense/meaning of them. I propose diverting in the way we make sense of these psychiatric labels, which is different from both correcting and adhering, moving away from lineal notions of progress when considering matters of change, development and growth.