Kerry Daynes
Mental health language has saturated the workplace, but most organisations still cannot tell the difference between a stressed employee, a distressed one, and a genuine behavioural risk. Wellbeing programmes treat the symptom; they rarely equip managers to read what is actually happening in front of them. The cost of that gap shows up in attrition, in safeguarding failures, and in incidents that hindsight calls obvious.
Kerry Daynes is a consultant forensic psychologist who helps organisations understand mental health, behavioural risk and human motivation with the same rigour she has applied to homicide investigations and high-secure psychiatric settings.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Kerry Daynes
- Twenty-five years assessing risk in prisons, secure hospitals and police investigations gives her workplace mental health content a substance that wellness-industry speakers cannot match.
- She translates clinical psychology into language line managers actually use, drawing on case material from homicide, stalking and serious violence work without sensationalising it.
- Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author of “The Dark Side of the Mind”, with a second title longlisted for the Crime Writers Association Golden Dagger; her published thinking is on the public record, not bureau copy.
- Trustee of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and patron of the National Centre for Domestic Violence, which makes her a credible voice on personal safety, stalking, and domestic abuse as workplace risks, not abstract HR topics.
Biography highlights
- Consultant Forensic Psychologist, Chartered Psychologist, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, HCPC-registered, Chartered Scientist
- Court-appointed expert witness in homicide, sexual assault and serious violence cases
- Author of “The Dark Side of the Mind” (Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller, Cassell 2019), “What Lies Buried” (Crime Writers Association Golden Dagger longlist) and “Is There a Psycho in Your Life?”
- “The Profiler” on Discovery’s “Faking It: Tears of a Crime”; documentary contributor for BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Netflix and the History Channel
- Trustee of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust; patron of the National Centre for Domestic Violence and Talking2Minds
- Former Lecturer in Applied Psychology, Manchester University
Biography
Most workplace conversations about mental health stop at awareness. They name the issue and offer a helpline. They rarely give managers the tools to interpret what they are actually seeing in a colleague, a candidate, or a customer. That gap is where Kerry Daynes works.
Her grounding is forensic. Twenty-five years inside prisons, secure psychiatric hospitals and major police investigations, including work as a court-appointed expert witness in homicide, sexual assault and serious violence cases. She began her career at HMP Wakefield at twenty-one and went on to lecture in applied psychology at Manchester University.
The published record carries the argument further. “The Dark Side of the Mind” was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller; “What Lies Buried” was longlisted for the Crime Writers Association Golden Dagger for non-fiction. As “The Profiler” on Discovery’s “Faking It: Tears of a Crime”, and through documentary contributions across BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Netflix, she has built a public body of work that takes clinical material seriously without flattening it into entertainment.
For corporate audiences, she draws on that material to address how people actually behave under pressure, how risk presents before it escalates, and how organisations can build mental health and personal safety practice that does more than tick a box. Her roles with the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and the National Centre for Domestic Violence give her work on stalking, coercion and domestic abuse a credibility that translates directly into safeguarding and duty-of-care conversations.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace mental health
- Behavioural risk and threat assessment
- Personal safety, stalking and coercive behaviour
- Psychology of motivation and human behaviour
- Resilience in high-pressure roles
- Communication and influence under stress
Ideal for
- CHROs, heads of wellbeing and people directors building substantive mental health strategy
- Heads of security, risk and safeguarding addressing personal safety and threat behaviour
- Leadership teams in healthcare, policing, legal services and frontline professions exposed to vicarious trauma
- Conference audiences in HR, EAP, occupational health and corporate safety sectors
Audience outcomes
- A clearer way to distinguish stress, distress and behavioural risk in colleagues and clients
- Practical language for managers who currently avoid mental health conversations
- A grounded view of stalking, coercion and domestic abuse as workplace safeguarding issues
- Insight into how forensic psychologists assess motivation, deception and threat, applied to everyday organisational life
- A more confident, less squeamish stance on the human realities behind wellbeing policy