Meet the ambassadors: Baroness Sheila Hollins

To kick off week four of our campaign, we want to share our appreciation for another amazing ambassador, Baroness Sheila Hollins.

She has spent her life researching developmental learning disabilities and she was a Consultant Psychiatrist in Learning Disability for 25 years.

Baroness Hollins graduated from St Thomas’s Hospital and worked as a GP before training in psychiatry. She is the Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry of Learning Disability at St George’s University of London, where she was Chair of the Division of Mental Health for three years.

She has been a policy advisor to the Department of Health and was President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists between 2005-2008, President of the British Medical Association between 2012-13, and is currently Chair of the British Medical Association Board of Science.

She is the founder and Chair of Books Beyond Words, a not-for-profit enterprise established in 1989 to help people with learning disabilities.

We admire her dedication to her career and her outstanding achievements as a psychiatrist. She says that she finds it straightforward to merge the different parts of her life.

“I think it’s much easier for women, certainly from my experience, [to not be] defined just by one aspect of your being. You can more easily be mother, wife, friend, employee, boss, whatever it might be,” she told What I See. “You can be those things all at the same time, with different parts of you shining at different moments.”

Feeling inspired? Watch the rest of her contribution here... or tell us your own story.