Ian Stockbridge

Alongside his commercial career, Ian spent many years volunteering in charity settings — working across autism support, mental health, bereavement, and crisis intervention. It was unpaid work that ran in parallel with the demands of a senior professional life. But it was where the conviction became practical — where the abstract recognition of human need met the reality of what genuinely skilled, compassionate support could do for the people receiving it.

By the time Ian formally retrained, he had already spent years in the work. The qualifications came later. The commitment had been there for a long time.

He retrained rigorously — building a qualification stack spanning CBT at degree level, a Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Supervision at Level 7, diplomas in Person-Centred Counselling and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and specialist certificates in ACT, Trauma, and CBT for Insomnia. Today he holds Senior Accredited status with both the BACP and the National Counselling & Psychotherapy Society (NCPS) — the highest level of individual accreditation from both of the UK’s leading professional bodies — alongside SCoPEd Band C, the highest band of the shared competence framework that independently verifies a practitioner is operating at the very top of their profession.

Hope Therapy was founded on the things that felt most broken about how therapy was being delivered: inflexible access, prohibitive cost, poor matching, and organisations that prioritised throughput over clinical quality. What it has become — 90+ qualified practitioners, UK-wide reach, specialist services including EMDR, CBT, and EAP provision — alongside a deep commitment to supporting neurodivergent individuals (including those with ADHD and autism) and an explicitly LGBTQIA+ inclusive and affirming practice — is the result of that original intention, built steadily over more than a decade.

Ian never stepped back from the work itself. He still sees clients regularly. He supervises practitioners across the Hope Therapy network. He co-presents The Talk Room Podcast. He is not a former clinician who now runs an organisation. He is a practising therapist at the top of his profession who also runs one.