Dr Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, author, consultant, keynote speaker and associate PhD supervisor at the Department for Psychoanalytic and Psychosocial Studies at the University of Essex. He cut his teeth as a counsellor for young people at London's largest further education college, later leading its Student Support Team. That early experience taught him something that has shaped everything since: psychological interventions need to flex to meet the people seeking them out, not the other way around. For more than twenty years, he has been committed to expanding the reach of psychotherapeutic thinking in accessible, often unconventional ways.
His unconventional style is grounded in more than two decades of experience as a clinician and academic. As a member of the faculty at Essex, Aaron directed the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies and began researching social media. In 2014, he published The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, the first book to apply psychoanalytic thinking to technology. He has since taught, consulted, and spoken worldwide on the subject, and is now one of the few clinicians bringing depth-psychological thinking to artificial intelligence, screen culture, and digital life — work he continues in his GQ psychology column and longer-form Substack newsletter, Depth Psychology in the Digital Age.
Aaron also has extensive experience in the media, having been the go-to mental health expert on BBC Radio 1's iconic live phone-in show The Surgery for several years. He appeared on the BAFTA-nominated BBC Three documentary Suicide and Me, wrote a column for the BBC Teens website, and was resident expert on CBBC's Lifebabble, a mental health programme for children that ran for two seasons and is still available on iPlayer. In 2014 he published Keep Your Cool, an illustrated self-help book for teens, later followed by The Little Book of Calm for adults.
Aaron now runs his private practice and consultancy from his office in Shoreditch, East London, offering weekly psychotherapy to adults and teens alongside psychological consultancy to individuals, businesses, and organisations. He writes and speaks widely on the psychology of technology and is currently working on his fourth book on heartbreak and loss.
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Dr Aaron Balick
Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor, Consultant, and Academic
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