Director Athena Consulting. Research Area: IPA Mental Health and wellbeing.

Dr Cindy O’Connor has worked in the area of prevention of suicide, self-harm and supporting people bereaved by suicide for over 16 years. She was one of the first employees of Pieta House based in Ireland and responsible for the building and development of the clinical side of the service. She is an accredited psychotherapist and clinical supervisor with IACP. She is passionate about promoting positive mental well-being and currently works as one of the Founders and Directors of "Athena, the Academy of Mental Health and Well-Being", she designs and delivers bespoke training programmes/presentations in the area of mental health and well-being in both the private and voluntary sector. Athena also provides individual and couple counselling and individual/group supervision and consultancy in the area of mental health and well-being. She co-authored “Developing the Pieta House Suicide Intervention Model: a quasi-experimental, repeated measures design study”, published in BMC Psychology (2015).

She completed her Doctoral Thesis "Therapist's Experiences of Witnessing the Physical Manifestations of Self-Injury:, An Interpretative phenomenological Analysis in 2021. She regularly guest lectures in Colleges across Ireland and has spoken at conferences both nationally and internationally on the topic of self-harm and suicide