Clarissa Batista de Padua

Clarissa is an integrative psychotherapist, Clinical Lead and Co-Founder of The Cognitive Collective. She has been working and training within mental health since 2016 and has supported adults and young people across both private and wider mental health settings, developing a particular passion for neurodiversity and inclusive, individualised mental health care.

Clarissa holds a Master’s degree in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which forms a core part of her therapeutic practice. She is also trained in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP) and mindfulness-based interventions, and draws on Compassion Focused and Schema approaches within her work.

Her approach to therapy is integrative, collaborative and creative. Rather than applying the same model or techniques to everyone, Clarissa adapts therapy around each individual, considering how they think, communicate, process information and experience the world. She believes that clients are the experts in their own lives and that her role is to bring therapeutic knowledge, curiosity and practical tools to help them understand themselves and create meaningful change.

Clarissa specialises in working with autistic and ADHD adults and young people, as well as supporting people experiencing anxiety, low self-esteem, stress, identity difficulties and life transitions. Her style is warm, relaxed and non-judgemental, with an emphasis on building a genuine therapeutic relationship in which clients can feel comfortable being themselves.

Her passion for neurodiversity developed early in her training and has continued to shape both her therapeutic work and the wider services she has helped to create. She is particularly interested in moving away from one-size-fits-all approaches to mental health care and creating therapy that recognises difference without automatically treating that difference as something that needs to be corrected.

Alongside her individual clinical work, Clarissa is Clinical Lead and Co-Founder of The Cognitive Collective. She oversees the clinical quality of our services, ensuring that our approach remains evidence-based, ethical, neurodiversity-affirming and centred around the individual. She also supports and mentors our clinical team, helping therapists to develop their practice while maintaining the high standards of care we expect across the service.

For Clarissa, good therapy is not about teaching someone how to fit more comfortably into other people's expectations. It is about understanding the whole person — their experiences, strengths, difficulties and individual way of seeing the world — and creating a therapeutic space that works with them.