Whose Job Is It to Say It?
Henna Lone
Art Psychotherapist, Children and Young People
September 8, 2026
Audio
About this Episode
Henna Lone is an art psychotherapist working with children and young people in London, mostly in schools and currently also on a paediatric inpatient ward. She came to the profession through a fine art degree and years as a teaching assistant in a special needs school, and qualified during the pandemic.
This conversation starts with that training, and what it did and did not prepare her for. Henna is direct: the course did not prepare her to be a non-white, Muslim practitioner, and the rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric since has only widened the gap. From there the two of them get into the question that sits under most conversations about race in therapy spaces and rarely gets said out loud: whose job is it to start the conversation, and what does it cost to always be that person?
Beulah, a mixed heritage practitioner, brings her own position into the room, and the two of them do not always land in the same place. Along the way: what happens when a client is curious about who you are, why withholding is never neutral, and why understanding the systems around a client (the school, the estate, the point in history their family arrived) is not extra credit but the work itself.
Henna Lone
Art Psychotherapist, Children and Young People
Henna Lone, Art Psychotherapist, Children and Young People
Henna Lone is an art psychotherapist based in London. After a BA in Fine Art she worked as a teaching assistant in a special needs school, where working alongside art and drama therapists led her to train as an art psychotherapist. She has since worked predominantly with children and young people in schools, and is currently also part of a paediatric inpatient ward team.
Henna is a South Asian Muslim practitioner who trained through the pandemic, an experience she describes as chaotic, difficult, and fundamental to the way she now thinks and works. She also teaches and supervises on an art psychotherapy training, and is an active voice on how the profession holds, or fails to hold, non-white practitioners and the conversations they are so often left to start.
What You'll learn
- Why art psychotherapy training can leave non-white and Muslim practitioners unprepared for the profession, and what "having to pick one identity" looks like in practice.
- How to recognise the constant, exhausting calculation of whether to raise race or faith in a room where nobody else is, and why that labour so often falls on the same people.
- How fear operates on both sides: the majority practitioner's fear of offending, and the marginalised practitioner's fear of not being heard, or of relationships breaking down.
- Why the context around a client (community, school, the point at which their family came to the UK) belongs at the centre of your thinking rather than the edges.
- A practical stance when a client is curious about your identity: be curious about their curiosity first, and think hard about what withholding communicates.