Hampton

Dr McFarlane has worked in both infant, child and adolescent and adult settings. Dr. McFarlane began her career at St Vincent’s Hospital Acute Adult Inpatient Unit. Since that time, she has worked as a Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychologist at the Austin Hospital Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service and The Alfred Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service (including the Alfred Infant Team). She has also worked as a Senior Clinical Psychologist at the Monash Medical Centre for the Consultation and Liaison Psychiatry Team in paediatrics.

Dr McFarlane has a special interest in anxiety and developmental trauma as well as post-traumatic stress disorder, attachment focused parenting across childhood and adolescence. She also has a special interest in working with infants.

Dr McFarlane has significant experience in assessing and treating anxiety, mood disorders, eating disorders, self-harm, complex trauma (both critical incident and developmental trauma), somatic difficulties and developmental issues across the lifespan that result from early attachment relationships. She focuses particular attention on emotional regulation/dysregulation patterns. In particular, Dr. McFarlane uses focused mindfulness strategies and body-oriented techniques that stem from her training using a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Framework (https://www.sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org). She also has training and experience in Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing (EMDR).

Dr McFarlane has significant interest and experience in matters relating to child/family court proceedings. Specifically, Dr. McFarlane’s doctoral thesis examined the usefulness of a scale designed to assess children’s suggestibility. It further examined the degree to which individual differences could predict young children’s suggestibility and considered the implications for eyewitness testimony. Hence, she has expert knowledge regarding the impact of leading and suggestive questions and interviewing techniques, on later eyewitness testimony. Dr McFarlane has an interest and experience in child and family court proceedings and draws on a number of frameworks when working with families in this regard, including; Trauma and attachment theories (Perry, B., Van der Kolk, B., Bowlby, J.) and Dyadic developmental psychotherapy (Hughes, D.) where an attachment disruption in the parent child relationship is present. Her therapy dog, Nellie, is often present during sessions as well.

Dr. McFarlane provides clinical supervision to provisional and registered clinical and general psychologists and is a board approved supervisor through the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). She provides consultation and supervision across a variety of settings including, private practice, AHPRA, schools, community mental health, headspace and rural and remote settings.