Experience put to good use in mental health field
Except 17-year-old Heather wasn’t studying. She was crying.
It was then that her mental health struggles, which were to torment her well into her 20s, came to the fore.
“I found studying for my Highers really difficult. I couldn’t study like a normal student would be able to do,” she explained.
“It wasn’t something I felt comfortable talking to my parents about. It was something to be ashamed of, something I needed to deal with on my own.
“Looking back, it’s a ridiculous way to think about things. If it had been a physical health problem, I’d have said: ‘Mum, this has happened.’ It was something I had to hide away from. I was in so much pain that I really did not know what to do. You are aware of how people would potentially judge you.”
But it wasn’t just the wider, societal stigma she had to contend with in 2002.
Keenly aware of the negative attitudes that were commonly held at the time towards people with mental health conditions, Heather began applying those stereotypes to herself – a process psychologists define as selfstigmatisation and one she was later to explore with a deep interest during her work with mental health charity See Me.
Despite her unhappy relationship with the burden that was academic study, Heather left Lanark Grammar with admirable grades that would gain her entry to the University of Glasgow to study French and the Classics.
Having followed the path expected of a ‘fresher’ by moving into a city flat shared with other students, the fear of stigma and what people might say was, for Heather, draining.
“The girls in the flat were really supportive and wanted to help. But at that time, it was professional help I was needing,” she said.
“I had to leave halfway through second year, aged 18 or 19. That is when I first had help with mental health problems – depression, anxiety and self harm.”
Heather took a part-time job with a clothing retailer in Glasgow city centre, and embarked on a music business course at Stow College – but due to her deteriorating mental health, she couldn’t see it through.
Keen to get her credits up, she made a valiant attempt at returning to university part-time to complete her degree. Finding it increasingly difficult to attend lectures and tutorials, Heather’s dad joined her for a meeting with one of her lecturers, who questioned whether she was “capable of keeping up.”
That’s when she left her studies behind, moved back to her parents’ home in Lanark and took a job as an administrator with a local small business. But her mental health struggles became overwhelming.
“In 2012/13, when I was 27 or 28, I had a really bad spell with mental health. That was the time I found most challenging,” she recalls.
“In part, that was due to being unhappy with what I was doing. When you’ve been in your own living space and you move back with your parents, the parent/child dynamic doesn’t change – but you are an adult, going back home.
“For me, with the panic attacks and