About

Maltese, in Milan since 2001.

I am Maltese, and English is my mother tongue. I read psychology at the University of Malta, and I came to Milan in 2001 for what I assumed would be a couple of years. I have worked here ever since.

I took a master's degree in social and developmental psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, and then a doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Bergamo. My psychotherapy training was in Gestalt, at the Centro Studi di Terapia della Gestalt in Milan, where I qualified in 2012. In 2017 I was recognised as an associate trainer in psychotherapy by the Federazione Italiana Scuole e Istituti Gestalt. I am also certified in EMDR.

My clinical career began in 2007, in the paediatric cardiology and cardiac surgery departments of a hospital outside Milan. That was not a plan so much as an opening, and it turned out to shape everything that followed. Working with children born with heart conditions, with the adults those children become, and with the families around them taught me the thing I have spent the rest of my career on: that serious illness is a psychological event as much as a medical one, and that the psychological part is usually the part nobody has time for.

Since 2016 I have directed the clinical psychology service at that hospital, an IRCCS research hospital, where I coordinate psychological care across the wards and the outpatient clinic, run a counselling service for staff, and work at getting the psychologist properly integrated into the medical team rather than called in at the end. In 2018 I joined the University of Milan as a researcher, and I was appointed Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology in November 2024.

Alongside all of this I have kept a private practice, and I have been seeing patients at Studio Metafora in Milan for many years. It is the part of the work that has changed least, and the part I would least like to give up.

Training and qualifications

Languages

English and Maltese are my mother tongues. I have worked in Italian for more than twenty years, and I see patients in English or in Italian.