ABSTRACT
Looking back, I think it was also important to me that I was accepted and valued, in spite of the private school blazer that I wore and tried to hide!
I applied to study psychology at university because I was interested in how people’s minds worked and why we behave in certain ways. Swansea University offered me a place and I arrived in September 1990, still quite naive about people and society. I remember being surprised that one of my new friends at university did not come from a two-parent or even a two-car family! I struggled to adjust to my independent life away from home, and in my first year I experienced several periods of very low mood. I went to one counselling session but didn’t go back, because I didn’t feel immediately better. I tried to speak to other people about what I was going through, but it was only when I spent the summer working that I began to feel more in control of my life again and my mood lifted. A couple of friends had started a project with Student Community Action and I joined them, going out on social activities with young people in hostel accommodation. We had little training or supervision and the outings were sometimes chaotic, but as with my volunteering experience at school, the focus was on relationships and I loved it. I also became interested at this time in the work of Horace Dobbs, a former research scientist who took depressed people to swim with dolphins.2 I contacted him and arranged to undertake a piece of analysis for him, evaluating feedback questionnaires which explored the therapeutic effects of listening to a recording of dolphins and music on people with depression. I was later able to use this work for my Honours dissertation.
