Talented artist Helen Southall thought her life was over before it had really started after years battling against depression.
Now, with the support of national charity Shaw Trust, she is helping hundreds of sick children to make their mark as part of Middlesbrough Council's trail-blazing Complementary Education's Hospital Teaching Service (PRU). Complementary Education is part of the new Children, Families and Learning Service, recently formed in Middlesbrough.
The children's work, together with heaps of other talented offerings from the hundreds of youngsters who have been nurtured by the Complementary Education service this year, will be on show at a special exhibition, which also marks the retirement of service Head Michael Carter at the end of the year.
Guisborough-born Helen, who has been celebrating every day since she got her dream job with Complementary Education, based at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, explains why she is speaking out about her personal battle to change her life.
"Mental health is not something that's really talked about, because of the stigma attached, but there are millions who suffer silently from it and I want to show other people that they too can get their lives back. If it means that I have to become the Cleveland face of mental health, then so be it!" says Helen, 31.
"If you'd told me two years ago that I would be leaping out of bed every day to do a job that I love, I wouldn't have believed you. Of course I have a condition that I will continue to manage, but I am living proof that everything is possible."
Helen was just 15 when she was officially diagnosed with depression, and the illness has dogged her life, until now. She had her first nervous breakdown as she studied for her Art and Craft and Design A Levels, and another when she launched into her career in jewellery design after graduating from Birmingham's University of Central England.
"Looking back, I can congratulate myself on getting my art degree and my A Levels, despite what was going on, but at the time I saw what happened as just another failure," says Helen.
"I was stuck in this mindset of thinking my illness was my fault and I hated myself with a passion. Now I know that it's a disability, like any other disability. I can manage and control it and I have an awful lot to offer."
Helen had fled home to her parents' home in Guisborough after her breakdown in Birmingham and benefited from NHS Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which helps people to manage their own condition.
After eight months on Incapacity Benefit, she was ready to do some voluntary work to ease back into the working world. Luckily, the Job Centre passed her on to Shaw Trust, the country's leading provider of employment services for people battling against disabilities or disadvantages.
Shaw Trust Development Officer Joe Peacock put Helen onto the preparatory Workstep programme, and then colleague Maureen Frazer found her voluntary work with Middlesbrough's Hospital Teaching Service (PRU) at the Stainsby Unit for Anxious Pupils. Now Helen is in a paid temporary job as the popular Art Therapy Co-ordinator working in Complementary Education's teaching team on the children's wards at the James Cook University Hospital.
"Shaw Trust got me back to work, end of story. Joe has been fantastic. He's always there if I need him," says Helen, who has just passed her Stage 2 Teaching Assistant exams.
"But more than that, during the Workstep course, we were considering what it felt like to be disabled, and that was a eureka moment for me. Instead of thinking 'I'm ill and it's my fault', I said 'I have a disability and I can do something about it'.
"I came bouncing out of the course, empowered and desperate to get a job to show what I could do."
As well as diverting patients from their illnesses, the teaching service can bring them on in leaps and bounds. One long-term student, who is quadriplegic and ventilator-dependent, has just taken his GCSE in Business Studies, by communicating through a member of staff.
Helen, who enjoys herself so much that she invariably works longer hours than she's required to, will use any creative means possible to engage her young pupils.
Faced with a young person's distress at being in hospital, Helen made penguins out of bendy balloons with her, and then photographed them on adventures round the hospital.
After visiting various departments, the penguins 'escaped' from hospital, but they scuttled back quickly because it was too cold outside. It was a clever ploy, because the child saw, like the penguins, the hospital as a safe place of haven.
Helen's dream is do an MA in art psychotherapy. "I absolutely love it here. I've always wanted a job where I enjoy my work and go home thinking I've made a difference," smiles Helen, whose out of work hours are pretty full anyway as a volunteer for the Saltburn Animal Rescue charity.
"Most of the time I just don't want to go home from here. The rewards are indescribable."
