Meet Darren McGarvey, EMDR UK’s New Patron: Podcast
16 January, 2025

EMDR Association UK’s new patron, Darren McGarvey, is a writer, columnist, broadcaster, social commentator, and hip-hop recording artist (Loki). He grew up in Pollok on the south side of Glasgow and has lived through extreme poverty, addiction, and homelessness.
In a new podcast, Darren shares his story, detailing how he began EMDR therapy as a teenager following the sudden death of his mother. He highlights the importance of his relationship with his therapist, Marlyn:
“A feature of growing up in a working class community, particularly a housing estate is there is just a feeling of ceaseless activity […] I found it very relaxing just to be in Marlyn’s presence, often just the tone of her voice would elicit in me a deep relaxation and that was besides all of the stuff we talked about and discussed or the therapy itself.”
Darren offers his thoughts on the current discourse surrounding trauma on social media:
“…there’s something about social media culture that compels us to tell the story of our trauma […] the cost is immense of the disclosures at public level […] what people need to understand is that the fleeting catharsis passes and what you’re left with is the toothpaste that you can’t put back in the tube.”
In 2009, he founded Volition Scotland, an organisation that was designed and run by the young people who used it. He was part of the Poverty Truth Commission that was hosted in Glasgow in the same year. McGarvey became the Violence Reduction Unit’s first ever ‘Rapper-in Residence’ in 2015 and continues to work across Scotland in some of its most challenged communities.
Darren was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, which deemed his books on social inequality to be of ‘outstanding literary merit’.
His new book Trauma Industrial Complex: Oversharing in the Age of Lived Experience is available for pre order and due for release in August 2025
Darren will be speaking at the EMDR UK conference in Liverpool 21-22 March 2025.