Hi! I’m Eilidh, author of the book Journey to the Centre of the Mind – a Particularly Mental Gap Year. Here’s a bit about me, for those interested.
Journalist Eilidh C. Richards was born out of spite and desperation in the year of the pig – 1983 – in the arse-end of nowhere in Norway. She started writing at the age of four and hasn’t stopped since.
With a BA in linguistics from the University of Oslo and an MA in Journalism from the University of Winchester, you would think that she would have been able to do something productive in her life by now, but it would take a full-on mental breakdown for her to finally find her voice and actually listen to it.
A long-time sufferer of sometimes crippling OCD, complex PTSD and depression, Eilidh has been in and out of the public and private healthcare system in both her native Norway and the UK – this has given her insight into how overwhelming the experience can be for the patient when they can’t fit into the neat little boxes on the multitude of forms medical staff are forced to use as guidelines and tools for their diagnostic work.
Eilidh found through her writing an outlet for dealing with her own mental hardships when the system failed her, and she has put her journalistic skills to good use and taken great pleasure in diving into the research needed to better understand the makings of her own mind, her use of quick wit and dark sense of humour making the end result rather palatable to the reader. Journey to the Centre of the Mind – a Particularly Mental Gap Year is her first novel.
Eilidh currently resides somewhere in time, but her still-beating heart will always belong to Edinburgh, the town that took her in when she had nowhere else to go.
Welcome to my world!
Gonzo With the Wind 