Parents believe acclaimed Italian project would have helped Joshi, 24

said: “Joshi was a beautiful, inspirational daughter and there must have been a way of reaching her.

“I believe there could be tens of thousands of young people like Joshi who could be helped immeasurably by methods from Trieste.

“I didn’t accept that she was just beyond help, the way some professionals had made me feel.

“I went to psychiatrists in the NHS and private, we spent a fortune, more money than I care to talk about, on both sides of the Atlantic, and they had nothing to offer to help Joshi.” The family quit Scotland when a psychiatrist at Stirling Royal Infirmary told them: “We have nothing left for Joshi, nothing in our armoury we haven’t tried.”

Mark said: “Psychiatrists in Scotland are all stuck on this old ‘chemical imbalance’ model and were all limited by that because it was obvious that even if there was a medicine solution, they didn’t know what it was.

“They would tell Joshi, ‘The problem is your brain chemistry. And she kept asking, ‘Well, how do you know my brain chemistry is at the right level?” And they didn’t in the end know the answer, and all the time she was getting more frustrated.”

Mark began to look at treatment systems worldwide and recovery outcomes.

He said: “I made myself a cursory league table, looking at what countries had good outcomes and what models work and which don’t. Scotland was pretty bad, well down the table.

“Here we’re stuck in this medical, biological model that rattles on about chemical input and output of the brain. But life is more complicated than input/output and that fact underpins some of the most successful systems, like that in Trieste.”

The Trieste Model is built on an “open-door approach” to treatment and allows them a say in their recovery.

Mark’s dedication to the Trieste Model was solidified after he inquired and was put through to clinical director Roberto Mezzina, who is world renowned for his work.

He said: “I told him my daughter was a lover of Shakespeare, and she was a poet. He told me that one of the first ‘treatments’ he’d have looked to would have been getting someone to talk to her about Shakespeare or maybe getting a well-known poet to engage with her as part of a therapy.

“I was shocked to the core by this because this was not psychiatry speech. This was somebody who was telling me something, for the first time, that made sense.

“It focused on people’s lives, what they’re good at, what their dreams are.

“It could have been the church, if that’s what you were into, or Hell’s Angels or football.

“And so I began to talk more and more and we and I realised this was a system that could have saved Joshi because that’s what she needed.”

The family’s passion to bring the Trieste Model to Scotland was given a boost when they were contacted by community group, the Inverness Mental Health Recovery College, who wanted to discuss setting up a Joshi Project in the city.

Mark said: “I would love to think there could be Joshi Projects all over Scotland and maybe Inverness could be the first one.

“I’ve spoken to so many people about the Trieste Model and, by God, it works.”