For trainers and course leaders

What this helps you do

• Recognise when disability is being misread clinically.
• Adapt teaching and assessment while keeping the learning objective.
• Support disabled trainees without treating access requests as evidence of unsuitability.
• Identify structural changes, and who is responsible for them.

Choose your route

If you train coaches: the material on access (sheet 06), Mine, Yours, Ours, System (03), affirmative responses (04) and communication and pace (07) transfers well to coaching. The material on assessment, diagnosis and clinical formulation (02, and parts of 01) needs clinical training, so use it only within your competence.

Two ways to start

If you can only run three sessions, choose the route that fits your group.

All eight teaching sheets

Each sheet has everything you need to run the session: what to prepare, a timed plan with breaks, the key ideas, a fictional case, a worked example, facilitator notes with likely answers, feedback criteria, a worksheet, guidance for difficult moments, a follow-up task and references. Each also links to a fuller page on the site if you want more depth, and has downloadable slides with speaker notes and an editable Word worksheet.

How to use them

• Adapt freely. Timings, activities and questions are suggestions. Change them to suit your group, your modality and your setting.
• Order: the two routes above are starting points. The other sheets fit where your curriculum needs them, for example Socratic Questioning in CBT skills teaching.
• The cases are fictional. Every person in an activity is invented for teaching. Please keep them that way, and don’t ask participants to share their own disability or health information as part of an exercise.
• Reuse. All sheets are shared under CC BY-NC 4.0, so you can print, share and adapt them with credit to this site. An extra permission also lets you teach from them on fee-paying courses. See Reusing This Material for how to credit and what isn’t covered.

Towards a disability-inclusive programme

Single sessions help, but the bigger question for course leaders is structural. The page Training Institutions and Disability sets out the argument in full: a programme can teach excellent psychotherapy while its attendance rules, placements and exercises teach disabled trainees that they were not expected. These are the questions it suggests asking.

Use the table to record what you find. A Word version of this table has extra columns for the barrier, resources needed and feedback from disabled learners.

For each answer, note the evidence (a policy, a handbook page, feedback from trainees), not the intention. A change is only agreed once someone with the authority to make it has signed up to it.

From research by this site’s author. An unpublished 2025 MSc study of four visibly disabled psychotherapists in Ireland (Donaghey & O’Connor) makes four recommendations for the profession:

• compulsory disability modules in therapy training, grounded in the social model and shaped by lived experience;
• supervision that addresses visibility, disclosure and embodiment;
• ethical guidance on contingency planning and boundaries for disabled therapists;
• inclusion policies that change structures rather than offering token representation.

From the trainee’s side

Three short accounts, written for teaching. They are illustrative, not real people’s stories. Each follows the same pattern, so you can use it with your own examples.

What research says about training

Research on disability in psychotherapy training is still small. A few studies are directly useful to course leaders:

• Rivas and Hill (2018) interviewed ten counselling interns about counselling disability. The authors recommend adding personal narratives and service learning to counsellor training.
• Coop (2018), a University of East London doctoral thesis, explored the experiences of trainee clinical psychologists who identify as living with a disability.
• Donaghey and O’Connor (2025), above, also recommend comparative research on how therapy training institutions include disability across different countries and cultures.

For what disabled clients themselves report about therapy, which makes strong teaching material, see What Visibly Disabled People Report About Therapy. For research gaps across the whole site, see Research Gaps.

Running sessions accessibly

Assume there are disabled people in the room, whether or not anyone has said so. That includes participants and co-trainers.

• Send slides and handouts in advance, in formats that work with screen readers, and say what the session will involve physically.
• Build an alternative into every experiential exercise and offer it to everyone, so nobody has to ask or explain.
• When an adaptation is requested, ask what the exercise is for, then find another way to get there. Don’t ask for a diagnosis.
• Online, turn on captions, read out what is on screen, and make cameras optional.
• Plan regular breaks, and make it fine to move, stand, lie down or step out.
• Treat disclosure as optional. Don’t build exercises that rely on participants sharing their own disability or health history.

Each teaching sheet also has its own accessibility notes.

Who wrote these

The sheets are written by Casey Donaghey, a disabled psychotherapist and researcher, and built from pages on this site, each checked against its sources. See About Us.

Limitations. The sheets, the programme questions and the facilitator guidance haven’t been formally evaluated. They don’t confer accreditation or CPD credit, and they aren’t a check of your legal duties.