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Dr Michael Spencer is Consultant Psychiatrist at the First Response Service - the front-line NHS mental health service covering Cambridgeshire and Peterborough - and the Pain Management Centre, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He is Chair of the Chronic Pain Special Interest Group of the European Association for Psychosomatic Medicine.

Specialism

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Dr Spencer has experience in assessing and treating psychiatric difficulties in children, adolescents and adults. He has particular expertise in the psychiatric/psychological response to chronic pain conditions.

He is experienced in diagnosing and managing psychiatric difficulties in complex contexts including chronic pain, accidents and trauma and upon backgrounds of pre-existing psychological conditions and other traumas.

Dr Spencer has expertise in working with a wide range of psychiatric conditions, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic pain disorder / somatic symptom disorder, in addition to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

He has the academic and clinical experience necessary to understand the overlaps and interactions between psychological vulnerabilities such as adverse childhood experiences and later psychiatric disorder, the spectrum of co-existing psychiatric presentations that can occur in neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and the interface between physical and psychological factors in chronic pain.