Alex Murray
Alex Murray is a psychologist and mental health entrepreneur.
She holds postgraduate training in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), and Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (FACT). She also specialises in Migrant Mental Health (University of Barcelona) and Perinatal Mental Health (Whāraurau and COPE).
She is currently based in New Zealand, where she is registered as a counsellor with NZAC and is a proud member of Perinatal Anxiety and Depression Aotearoa (PADA).
Companies founded
Alex is the founder and director of two mental health companies in New Zealand:
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Therapy for Migrants
Therapy for Migrants offers specialised counselling for Spanish-speaking immigrants around the world as they navigate the emotional challenges of settling into a new country.
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PerkUp Self-Therapy
PerkUp offers self-therapy toolkits to help young people navigate everyday challenges.
Collaborations
She has collaborated with SafetyWing, a YC18 Silicon Valley startup, helping to develop a mental health platform for digital nomads, and has contributed content to the award-winning New Zealand-based startupGriefity, where she also serves on the advisory board and provides clinical input.
Alex has delivered professional training in migratory grief and acculturative stress to educators across the U.S. through the Council of the Great City Schools, and authored a chapter in their publication, “Considerations for Identifying and Supporting Newcomer Students (2025)”.
In New Zealand, she received funding from the Ministry for Ethnic Communities to provide resettlement counselling to Latin American immigrants. She currently works at Health New Zealand within Asian and Ethnic Health Services, supporting the Latin American community, and also at Plunket as a Mental Health Practitioner in their Online Perinatal Wellbeing Service.
Publications
In her academic work, Alex has expanded on the theory of migratory grief originally proposed by psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui, identifying two additional types of grief beyond the original seven, a topic she explores in her first book, “Migratory Grief”, co-authored with her colleagues Melina Ossana and Sabrina Montiel.
She has also contributed significantly to the concept of language grief, developing the framework of micro-duels, coining the “Little Mermaid Syndrome,” and creating a psychometric scale to measure the impact of language barriers on immigrants’ lives. She explores this topic in greater depth in her second book, “Language Grief and 21 Techniques to Overcome the Language Barrier”.
Community Work
Alex facilitates mental health self-management courses at the Parnell Community Centre.
She currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand
with her husband and daughter.
Outside of work, Alex is a proud mama
who loves spending quality time
with her family ❤️