About Us
5. Lindsay Riddoch
Lindsay was an activist and a poet, ardently campaigning for better mental health services and ensuring people’s voices are heard. She inspired love and friendship in many and had a profound influence on those she encountered.
Lindsay was highly academically talented, gaining a First class degree in History from the School of African and Oriental Studies, London. Campaigning and activism were at the heart of both her personal life and her career, which spanned working with politicians, the digital activism platform 38 Degrees, the NHS, and the mental health charity Rethink. The issues Lindsay passionately and effectively campaigned on included the environment, climate change, political and police accountability, and mental health.
Her activism on mental health began as a teenager, when she launched her own campaign, called “1,000 voices” – an online platform where young people could share their experiences of mental health issues. She won support for this from TV star Stephen Fry, and was featured in a story in the Edinburgh Evening News in September 2011.
In her later career she set up a working group to enable mental health service users and carers to voice their ideas for change, and carried out work aimed at building more effective services and support for people with mental health needs.
Throughout all of this fantastic work, she was wrestling with serious mental health problems of her own. In December 2017, following 18 months as a psychiatric inpatient, Lindsay took her own life on the eve of her 25th birthday, ending her long and difficult struggle with serious and poorly understood mental health problems. Whilst Lindsay never obtained a full and clear diagnosis, we know it included aspects of personality disorder and autism.
Words That Carry On was set up in memory of Lindsay and inspired by her life, her poetry and her passion for ensuring that people who lived with mental health problems had their voices heard. For more information on Lindsay’s life and Words That Carry On, please visit Words That Carry On.
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