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Keir Harding to give our 2023 Elizabeth Casson Memorial Lecture

RCOT
03 August 2022

We’re delighted to announce our 2023 Elizabeth Casson Memorial Lecture speaker will be Keir Harding. 

Keir Harding is a highly regarded occupational therapist specialising in mental health, supporting people who use self-harm and recurrently feel suicidal. He is currently the CEO and Clinical Lead at Beam Consultancy. He uses his social media following, along with public speaking, journal articles and print and broadcast media, to advocate for his client group and promote occupational therapy. 

Keir shared, ‘There is nothing the RCOT could have done to make me question their judgement or leadership more than invite me to give this lecture. Joking aside, when I qualified, I felt I didn’t have a voice and it’s inconceivable that my peers feel I have something useful to say to the profession.  

‘I look forward to delivering something that reflects Elizabeth Casson’s pioneering spirit in a way that champions the essential work we do.’ 

Keir Harding will speak at our prestigious Elizabeth Casson Memorial Lecture, taking place online in April 2023. We’ll let you know on our website and social media when bookings open in early 2023. 

About Keir Harding

Keir graduated in 1999 and has worked in mental health his entire career. Keir says he was a terrible student and at best an average practitioner for much of this time. Keir has worked in a range of roles, often going into new practice areas where OTs had not previously worked. For a lot of his career Keir was seen as a generalist practitioner who did not do ‘proper’ OT and he lacked the language and confidence to convincingly argue back. 

Keir specialises in working with people who use self-harm, recurrently feel suicidal and live with enormous amounts of stigma. He began to build a following on social media arguing for better treatment for this client group, particularly around ceasing to export traumatised young women into private hospitals. Keir extolled and amplified this message using social media, conference presentations, journal articles, print and broadcast media. He is one of the few occupational therapists recognised as an expert in the mental health field. 

Keir left the NHS after feeling his specialism could not be utilised due to his profession. Despite this, he works hard to promote and support the role of occupational therapy with the clients he works with. He has written articles calling for more OT input in this area and used Model of Human Occupations (MOHO) to describe the work of adapting social environments, such as actively challenging stigma and developing trusting empathic relationships. Keir was fundamental in overturning the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) decision not to have an OT on their panel to review the NICE guidelines for self-harm. 

Keir is one of the most visible and outspoken occupational therapists practising today who is passionate about his patients and profession. 

Keir Harding

About the Elizabeth Casson Memorial Lecture

The lecture is a memorial to Elizabeth Casson (1881–1954) in honour of her contributions to the profession of occupational therapy. The first woman to be awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine from the University of Bristol in 1929, Elizabeth Casson specialised in psychiatry and introduced occupational therapy to England, setting up the first school of occupational therapy, Dorset House, in Bristol. 

We award the lectureship to an RCOT member whose peers consider them to have made and be making a significant contribution to the profession’s development. 

See our previous Elizabeth Casson Memorial Lecture speakers.