My career in psychiatry now spans more than twenty-five years, although my interest in people—and in the stories beneath what we see—began much earlier.

After qualifying as a doctor in South Africa, I chose to complete my internship in Namibia, alongside a small group of newly qualified doctors from universities across South Africa. We were given a remarkable degree of responsibility from the beginning, working in a large and exceptionally busy hospital serving people from across a vast country. It was medicine at its most immediate: we had to think clearly, trust one another and learn very quickly. The experience shaped my confidence as a doctor, but Namibia itself—the people, the landscape and the particular spirit of the country—also left a lasting impression on me.

I later moved to Edinburgh and worked in paediatrics at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, including neonatology and oncology. Being alongside children and families during some of the most difficult periods of their lives gradually changed the direction of my career. I became increasingly interested in the emotional world surrounding illness: how children make sense of what is happening to them, how families adapt and cope, and how powerful it can be to feel properly listened to and understood.

That experience led me to psychiatry and, ultimately, to specialist training in child and adolescent psychiatry. Since then, I have worked across NHS CAMHS, early-intervention services for young adults and independent psychiatric practice. I now work mainly with children, adolescents, university students and young adults, often at points when life has become confusing, overwhelming or difficult to move through.

My interest in ADHD, autism and neurodiversity developed gradually as my career evolved. When I first entered child psychiatry, I imagined that my work would centre mainly on children’s emotional worlds, relationships and psychotherapeutic approaches. I did not expect neurodevelopmental psychiatry to become such an important part of what I do. That changed through meeting so many extraordinary children, young people and adults whose abilities, originality and ways of understanding the world could never be adequately captured by a diagnostic description.

Those experiences have made me increasingly aware both of the value of diagnosis and of its limitations. A diagnosis can bring recognition, provide a shared language and open doors to treatment, support and self-understanding. It can also become restrictive if it is treated as the whole explanation of a person. My starting point is therefore always the individual rather than the label: how their mind works, what they have experienced, the environments around them, the ways they have learned to cope and the strengths that may have become obscured by years of feeling different or misunderstood.

For me, a thoughtful psychiatric assessment is an act of making sense of things together. It brings medical, developmental, psychological, relational and social understanding into one picture. My role is then to explain that picture in a way that feels clear and useful—not to leave someone with more clinical language, but with a better understanding of themselves and a realistic way forward.

Treatment may include medication, psychological or therapeutic recommendations, practical changes and collaboration with families, schools, universities, GPs or other professionals. I draw on experience across a range of psychological and systemic approaches, while remaining grounded in careful medical assessment and evidence-based practice. I do not believe that the medical and the human need to sit on opposite sides of psychiatry; the best care makes room for both.

I founded Edinburgh Psychiatry to create the kind of clinical environment I value: calm, thoughtful and unhurried enough to understand the full picture. I want the people who come here to feel that they have been taken seriously, that the complexity of their experience has not been reduced to a checklist, and that we can begin to find a way forward together.