Private Practice
Miami Shores, Florida
Phone: 305.335.8043
Email:  mwhelehan@gmail.com  
maureen@bipolaradvantage.com

Maureen is fascinated by how the brain is shaped by the quality of our relationships. She has taken this fascination and applied it to her work with the innovative San Francisco based group “The Bipolar Advantage.”  Maureen works with “The Bipolar Advantage” to help break the link between the diagnosis of a mental illness and the taking on of the traditional identity of a mentally ill person. In collaboration with a group of professionals and mental health consumers and their families, Maureen is helping people with mood disorders find alternatives to the deficit based views of mental illness while working collaboratively with their healthcare providers.  Maureen’s forthcoming book, The Relationship Advantage, will be the third in the “Advantage” series, following Tom Wootton’s successful earlier books, The Bipolar Advantage and The Depression Advantage.

Recently, Maureen’s work has also taken her in the direction of organizational studies, in particular, the study of workplace mobbing and its health consequences for individuals and families, its impact on witnesses, and its effects on organizations in which it occurs.  The concept of “workplace mobbing” has only been described and researched in North America in the last decade, although it has been studied in Europe for about a decade longer.  Maureen and her colleague, Len Sperry, are continuing their research and writing in this area.

Maureen was a professor of counseling and family therapy for over twenty years at Barry University and was instrumental in the development of the marital and family therapy specializations in the master’s and doctoral programs in counseling.  She continues to serve Barry University through her service on dissertation committees.   She graduated from the National University of Ireland, University College, Dublin, with a degree in Social Science and from Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida with a Ph.D. in Systemic Family Therapy.  Maureen has been in active clinical family therapy and supervision practice for over twenty-five years.  She serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, The Family Journal, The Journal of Systemic Therapies and is a Co-Editor of The Qualitative Report.  She devotes considerable time to mentoring new authors in qualitative research and in family therapy.