Doing With, Not Doing To
Victoria Hill
Art Psychotherapist, NHS Adult Community Mental Health
September 8, 2026
Audio
About this Episode
Victoria Hill is an art psychotherapist who spent the best part of a decade working with children in special needs settings before moving into an NHS community mental health team for adults. The team had never had an art therapy service before. What she found there was that almost every one-to-one referral was a woman in her 40s, 50s or 60s, perimenopausal or postmenopausal, carrying a diagnosis of bipolar or personality disorder, and underneath it, early childhood trauma nobody had really sat with.
This conversation is about what you do with that. Vic and Beulah talk through the pathologising language that still hands responsibility back to the woman (even the newer, gentler acronyms), what it means to work within a medical system while offering something different inside it, and why the same visceral material that comes out on the mat with a child (the flamboyance, then the black paint) shows up in adult sessions too.
It is also a frank conversation about being an art psychotherapist in a large clinical team: the fraudulent feeling around psychiatry and psychology, the envy the work attracts, the choice to sit in the wings, and the grief we bring into the room without ever announcing it. Beulah is about to start work in a women's prison, and asks the questions of someone who wants to know.
Victoria Hill
Art Psychotherapist, NHS Adult Community Mental Health
Victoria Hill, Art Psychotherapist, NHS Adult Community Mental Health
Victoria Hill is an art psychotherapist working in an NHS community mental health team, where she set up and runs the team's first art therapy service. Before that she spent around nine years in clinical work with children in special needs settings, alongside earlier experience on inpatient wards and psychiatric intensive care units.
Vic's current practice centres on women in mid-life with long histories in services, diagnoses of bipolar and personality disorder, and underlying early trauma. She is interested in what art therapy offers across the lifespan, in the collaborative and sometimes fraught relationships between art therapy and medical models, and in the quieter, longer game of building a service through the work itself rather than the presentation. She qualified around ten years ago and offers supervision.
What You'll learn
- Why a diagnosis of bipolar or personality disorder in a mid-life woman so often sits on top of early trauma that services have not addressed, and how to hold both without denying either.
- How diagnostic language (including newer terms like "complex emotional and relational needs") still locates the problem in the individual, and what a different conversation in the room can sound like.
- What the child on the mat with red paint, then black paint, teaches about adult clients whose racing narrative drops something traumatic and then packages it away.
- How to survive as an art psychotherapist in a large medical team: the pull to feel fraudulent, the envy the work attracts, and when to sit in the wings rather than sell the service.
- How to bring your own grief and lived experience into the work without disclosure, so the client feels seen by a person rather than a lanyard.