Dr Dickon Bevington

Overview

Dickon Bevington

Dr Dickon Bevington, MA MBBS MRCPsych PGCert FRSA is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, who is Medical Director and Safeguarding Lead at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. With Peter Fuggle he is a co-founder of AMBIT (see below). Dr Bevington also works in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, where he leads CASUS, an outreach service for complex substance-using youth. He is a past Fellow of the Cambridge and Peterborough CLARHC, a collaboration based in Cambridge University dedicated to developing leadership and research in health and social care.

Education and Training

After studying Anthropology and Comparative Religion/Philosophy at Cambridge, Dickon qualified as a doctor in London, completing higher specialist training at Great Ormond Street/The Royal London Hospital. His consultant career started in adolescent in-patient psychiatry, but he has focused on developing and delivering innovative home-based or street-level outreach interventions for complex, co-morbidly burdened young people who are socially excluded, using mentalization to underpin both the therapeutic and the organisational approach to this work (AMBIT, Adolescent Mentalization-Based Integrative Treatment.)

Academic

Dickon trains and lectures internationally on Mentalizing in therapeutic practice and AMBIT, and has published various papers, books and chapters in the field of mentalization and multimodal outreach approaches. He is co-author of the large literature review “ What works for whom: a critical review of treatments for children and adolescents” (Fonagy, Cottrell, Philips, Bevington, Glazer and Allison, Guilford, 2014) which critically reviews all treatment trials in the preceding 10-15 years across the field. He co-authored the first book on AMBIT (Bevington, Fuggle, Cracknell and Fonagy, OUP, 2017) and is co-author with Prof Carla Sharp of a new book on Mentalization (“Mentalizing in psychotherapy: a guide for practitioners” Guilford, 2022)

Dickon led a collaboration of academics, clinicians and programmers to develop a radical 'wiki'-based approach to manualizing treatments, which is used by a wide range of treatments now, and is where AMBIT continues to be developed (https://manuals.annafreud.org)

Courses this tutor is involved in

• AMBIT: Local Facilitator Training (Previously Known as AMBIT Train the Trainer)
• Mentalizing Across Cultures in Early Years Safeguarding Contexts
• Mentalizing and Mentalization Based Treatments with Children, Young People and Families (MBT CYP) – An Introduction
• Mentalizing in Practice: Working with Parents and Infants
• Supervision in the Early Years