Dr Fiona Challacombe

Clinical Psychologist

Fiona qualified as a clinical psychologist from the IOPPN, King’s College London in 2005 and has worked in clinical practice in the NHS since. She worked for 15 years at the Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma where she developed and led a specialist service for parents with anxiety disorders. Fiona is a BABCP accredited CBT practitioner and supervisor.

Fiona is a specialist in the field of anxiety disorders and perinatal mental health and is an active clinical researcher in this field.  Fiona won a Peggy Pollak research fellowship from the Psychiatry Research Trust and completed her PhD at King’s College London in 2014. She recently completed an NIHR clinical lectureship.

Her research aims to better understand mental health difficulties and other stressors during pregnancy and the postpartum, to advance psychological interventions to give families the best start in life. She conducted the first randomised controlled trial of CBT for postpartum OCD, investigating treatment effects on anxiety and parenting and has recently completed a trial of intensive therapy during pregnancy.

Self-help books

• Challacombe, F., Bream Oldfield, V., & Salkovskis, P. M. (2011). Break Free From OCD: overcoming obsessive compulsive disorder with CBT. Random House.
• Challacombe, F., Green, C., & Bream, V. (2022). Break Free from Maternal Anxiety: A Self-Help Guide for Pregnancy, Birth and the First Postnatal Year. Cambridge University Press.

Research interests

Fiona’s research is internationally recognised and she has been invited to present her work as an expert at a range of academic conferences.

• • Perinatal mental health
  • Anxiety Disorders
  • Cognitive Behaviour Therapy & Psychological interventions
  • Parenting and mental health

Fiona Challacombe (researchgate.net)

Public engagement

Fiona is patron of the charity Maternal OCD (www.maternalocd.org) which raises awareness of perinatal OCD amongst service users and professionals. She regularly contributes to service user led conferences and events related to anxiety disorders and perinatal mental health, and is provides teaching and training on perinatal mental health to talking therapies services and specialist perinatal mental health services.

You can hear Fiona talk about CBT for perinatal OCD on the BABCP podcast Let’s Talk about CBT- Practice Matters