I am delighted to announce that Debra Kurs Therapy has been recognised in the SME News UK Enterprise Awards 2026 with two prestigious awards:
Best Inclusive Counselling Practice 2026 – Merseyside
Excellence Award in Community-Focused Mental Health Support 2026
https://smenews.digital/winners/debra-kurs-therapy/
Receiving this recognition during my first year in private practice is incredibly special.
Although Debra Kurs Therapy is a relatively new practice, it has been built upon more than four decades of experience working across youth and community development, education and mental health support. Those experiences have shaped my belief that therapy works best when people feel genuinely welcomed, respected and accepted.
My practice offers a warm, pluralistic approach to counselling, integrating evidence-informed approaches with compassion, collaboration and respect for each person's unique experiences.
I work with adults aged 16 and over and have particular experience supporting people living with trauma, anxiety, depression, grief, relationship difficulties, neurodivergence and identity exploration. I am also passionate about LGBTQIA+ affirmative practice and creating accessible therapeutic spaces for people who have often felt misunderstood elsewhere.
Community has always been at the heart of my work. Alongside private practice, I have continued to support voluntary and community-based mental health initiatives because I believe that emotional wellbeing should be as accessible and inclusive as possible.
I would like to thank SME News for recognising this work, and I extend my deepest gratitude to every client who has entrusted me with their story. It is a privilege to witness people's courage, resilience and growth.
These awards strengthen my commitment to continuing to provide ethical, inclusive and compassionate counselling for everyone who seeks support.
Thank you to everyone who has encouraged and supported me on this journey.
When Inclusion Is Only a Word: The Barriers Hidden-Disabled People Still Face
Over recent months, I have found myself thinking increasingly about the word inclusion. It appears everywhere: on websites, in policies, in equality statements, in staff training and among the values organisations proudly attach to themselves.
Yet my recent experiences have taught me that there can be an enormous gap between saying we are inclusive and knowing what to do when a disabled person is actually standing in front of you asking for something to be done differently.
As a therapist and a woman living with hidden disabilities, I am becoming increasingly aware of how many barriers remain. Some are physical and obvious, but others are embedded much more quietly in policies, environments, assumptions and attitudes.
Sometimes the greatest barrier is simply an unwillingness to listen.
One of the persistent problems surrounding hidden disability is that people still seem to carry an internal picture of what a disabled person should look like. If you do not match that picture, your needs can suddenly become negotiable.
You may find yourself explaining why you need an adjustment and then explaining it again. You may offer evidence, describe openly what you find difficult and suggest a perfectly reasonable solution, yet still encounter suspicion, defensiveness or inflexibility.
Sometimes the response is that familiar phrase: "It's our policy."
But a policy does not remove the responsibility to think about the individual in front of you. Neither does treating everybody identically necessarily mean treating everybody fairly. Sometimes treating everyone exactly the same is precisely what creates the disadvantage.
This is particularly troubling when it happens in places that should understand disability.
One of my more surprising experiences has involved the provision of professional therapy space.
I am not talking here about naming or attacking an individual business. I am interested in what the experience revealed about a much wider problem.
Therapists routinely work with people experiencing anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, physical disability and mental distress. You might therefore reasonably expect buildings specifically providing rooms to therapists to be particularly thoughtful about accessibility.
Yet what happens when the therapist renting the room is disabled too?
That question became very real for me.
I encountered difficulties around systems and procedures and asked for support. I raised concerns relating to my disability and my ability to use the building safely. I tried to discuss reasonable adjustments and fire evacuation arrangements because being able to enter a professional building is not the same as being able to leave it safely during an emergency.
What struck me most was the apparent assumption that treating every room renter in exactly the same way constituted fairness.
It does not.
A disabled therapist may need an adjustment just as a disabled client might.
Indeed, this experience has made me think much more deeply about the accessibility of the therapy profession itself. We rightly talk about making counselling accessible to disabled clients, but what about disabled counsellors?
Who is considering whether the booking system is accessible, whether communication methods are flexible, whether somebody with neurological or mobility difficulties can evacuate safely, or whether a therapist who cannot manage particular circumstances can be accommodated differently?
A therapy building can have beautiful rooms, comfortable chairs and welcoming décor while still containing significant barriers.
Accessibility is not an aesthetic.
My experiences have not been confined to professional spaces. Ordinary visits to providers of goods and services have also made me increasingly aware of how easily an environment can become inaccessible.
For somebody with sensory processing differences, autism, ADHD, hearing difficulties or neurological conditions, unnecessarily loud music, competing announcements, bright lighting, confusing procedures or chaotic queues can transform an ordinary activity into an exhausting one.
Asking for the volume to be reduced, somewhere quieter to sit, a little more time or clearer information is not asking to be treated like royalty. It is asking for access.
What has struck me is how often the outcome depends less upon whether the adjustment is possible and more upon the attitude of the person being asked.
I have experienced people responding with kindness and common sense, solving a problem within seconds. I have also experienced rigidity turning a very simple request into an upsetting confrontation.
That difference matters.
There is another aspect of hidden disability that receives far too little attention: the emotional labour involved in continually having to explain yourself.
A person may have to disclose private information simply to access something other people can access without a second thought. They may find themselves explaining their condition while already becoming overwhelmed, only to discover that knowing and articulating what they need is still not enough.
Eventually, some people stop asking.
Worse still, they may stop going.
An organisation can then mistakenly believe it has no accessibility problem because nobody is complaining. The reality may be that the people who could not access the environment have quietly disappeared.
That is not inclusion. It is exclusion that has become invisible.
My growing awareness has undoubtedly been sharpened by my work as a psychotherapeutic counsellor.
Without disclosing anyone's personal story, I repeatedly hear about people trying to navigate systems and environments that were simply not designed with their way of experiencing the world in mind.
Neurodivergent people can spend years believing they are somehow failing at things everyone else appears able to manage. Disabled people often become extraordinary advance planners because experience has taught them that they cannot assume their needs will be understood.
Before going somewhere, a person may already be wondering whether the environment will overwhelm them, whether they will be believed, whether they will have to disclose personal information, or whether asking for an adjustment will result in them being labelled difficult.
That anticipatory anxiety becomes another barrier in itself.
As a therapist, I can help somebody understand their nervous system, develop self-advocacy, establish boundaries and challenge internalised shame. What therapy cannot do is continually compensate for inaccessible environments and inflexible systems.
We cannot keep teaching disabled people how to cope with exclusion without also asking society to remove the barriers creating it.
When people hear the words disability discrimination, they may imagine somebody openly refusing a disabled person access because they are disabled.
Sometimes discrimination is that blatant. Often the reality is subtler.
A blanket policy may appear neutral while disproportionately disadvantaging disabled people. An organisation may proudly insist that it treats everybody equally without recognising that genuine equality sometimes requires different approaches for different needs.
A physical environment may technically meet certain accessibility expectations while remaining practically inaccessible to somebody with sensory, neurological or mobility difficulties.
The person creating the barrier may have absolutely no intention of discriminating.
But good intentions alone do not create inclusion.
Impact matters too.
Physical accessibility remains enormously important, but our cultural understanding of disability needs to become much broader.
Autism, ADHD, hearing impairment and many neurological conditions do not necessarily have an immediately recognisable appearance. Neither do many chronic illnesses, mental health conditions or other disabilities.
Not every assistance need is obvious either.
We therefore need to move away from a culture in which the first instinct is effectively, "Prove that you need this," and towards one that asks, "What would help you access this?"
That small change represents a very different understanding of disability.
What I want is not special treatment. I want reasonable adjustment to become such an ordinary part of customer service and professional practice that asking for it no longer feels exceptional.
I want staff to understand that when somebody discloses a disability, the appropriate response should be respectful curiosity and problem-solving rather than defensiveness.
I want providers of goods and services to understand that equality cannot simply exist in a document somewhere in the organisation. It has to be visible in policies, buildings, communication, staff training and everyday decision-making.
I particularly want those of us working within counselling, psychotherapy and mental health services to examine our own environments.
We cannot advocate inclusion for our clients while overlooking accessibility for disabled practitioners.
Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable lessons from my recent experiences has been recognising how much I previously did not see.
Living with hidden disability has made barriers more visible to me. Working therapeutically with neurodivergent and disabled people has made it increasingly difficult to dismiss these experiences as unfortunate individual incidents.
I now see connections between experiences occurring in very different places: shops, cafés, pubs, professional therapy spaces, healthcare environments and public services.
Different settings and different people, yet often the same underlying problem: the disabled person is expected to adapt to the system rather than the system considering whether it could reasonably adapt to the person.
That is why I no longer see this simply as a collection of individual complaints.
I see a cultural problem.
Importantly, I have also experienced excellent responses. I have met people who listened without making me feel awkward for asking, thought about the problem and found a sensible solution.
Those experiences are important because they demonstrate that accessibility does not always require expensive refurbishment, lengthy policies or specialist equipment.
Sometimes it means changing a procedure, communicating differently, reducing unnecessary sensory stimulation, offering an alternative arrangement or simply listening when somebody tells you what they need.
Disabled people should not have to become experts in equality legislation simply to buy lunch, enter a shop, use a service, practise their profession or participate in ordinary life.
Neither should we have to arrive everywhere permanently prepared for battle.
Perhaps providers of goods and services need to stop asking only whether they have an equality policy and begin asking something much more meaningful:
Do disabled people actually experience us as accessible?
That includes the customers entering our shops, the clients entering our therapy rooms and the disabled professionals renting and working within them.
Because inclusion is not what an organisation writes about itself.
Inclusion is what a disabled person experiences when they walk through the door — and whether they know they can safely get back out of it.
One Year On: Reflections from Private Practice
One year ago, I opened the door to private practice.
Like many therapists, I arrived carrying years of professional experience, alongside a quiet hope that I might create a practice built on compassion, curiosity and genuine human connection.
Read more: From the Therapy Room One Year On: Reflections from Private Practice
Over the past year, I have received two life-changing diagnoses.
At the age of 63, I was diagnosed with ADHD. More recently, at the age of 64, I was diagnosed as autistic.
People often ask whether this has changed me.
Read more: Why My Late ADHD and Autism Diagnoses Have Made Me a Better Therapist
Read more: The Calming Presence of Dogs: A Moment with Joey the Husky
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