My name is Rona McBrierty and I live in Edinburgh the capital city of Scotland.

I have been identified with mental health challenges for 35 years, but education and reflection has enabled me to identify that I was struggling long before then.
The struggle has changed over the years and I recognised 20 years ago that I lost my way and my fight had become my fight against the system, that fight only alienated me from me and the person that I wanted to be.

I had a strange belief that the system could fix me, if I could get them to understand my struggles, but without understanding my own struggles, it became impossible to communicate verbally and it resulted in behaviour that only alienated from support and treatment that really could reach the core need I had.

Layers and layers were woven over the 12 years of my adult life being constantly in acute psychiatric wards. This only further disconnected me from my own expertise and all sense of meaning and purpose.

This started to changed 20 years ago when the psychiatrist said if I did not change the way I was coping I would not see my next birthday.
This was the wake up call.

What followed is when I stepped-back into my life. The path has not been easy but hugely rewarding. What supported the change:

• Becoming involved with SRN
• Becoming a Peer Worker in the first formalised peer project in Scotland in 2006
• Being Introduced to WRAP
• Becoming a WRAP facilitator

These changes supported me to becoming self employed.

I have been successfully self employed for 12 years.

I have chosen to become a Certified Personal Medicine Coach as another layer of my own recovery but also as another tool that can support different human conversation to happen, within services but also in communities.