About Me - My Biography

My name is Merril Winney and I am the principal Psychologist at Yarra Psychology, located in the Cremorne area of Richmond, Melbourne. I am a Clinical Psychologist and have managed my own  private practice for 12 years. I enjoy working with clients experiencing stress, depression and anxiety. I especially like assisting clients who are experiencing stress due to  changes in their life. For example, workplace stress, promotion and relocation, career changes, redundancy or transition to retirement,  along with many personal issues such as adjusting to parenting, perinatal depression,  becoming an empty nester or adjusting to life after cardiac illness. Varied issues and problems make my working life interesting.

Counselling is personal, confidential and focused on assisting clients to identify a positive direction in their life.

Prior to working in private practice I worked for a large Australian company providing Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) and critical incident debriefing to Australian workplaces. So I was quite excited when recently asked to return to the corporate sector to  provide psychometric assessment for selection and recruitment for SME organisations. This in turn lead to expanding my repertoire of psychometric  tools to include the Myers Briggs Type Indicator MBTI and EQ-i 2.0 to enhance further understanding and development of  effective  stress management skills , communication, decision making and conflict management skills. I find the MBTI to be a most effective tool to assist individuals to learn about their personality preferences, develop self leadership and learn skills to be more effective team members. Emotional intelligence EQ can constantly be enhanced to assist positive functioning and the EQ-i-2.0 is a wonderful tool to identify current levels of emotional intelligence and areas to be developed to promote positive change. I am enjoying the working combination of continuing personal counselling and the expansion into delivering psychometric testing to promote positive and effective workplaces for the SME sector. Why leave it to the big organisations, everyone can benefit from personal counselling being valued  in regard to their current issues and needs and be provided with the skills to promote positive change.