From Breakdown to Breakthrough
In January 2017, I had a breakdown. I was struggling with anxiety, PTSD and insomnia, unable to face getting out of bed, let alone the office, and the guilt of not being there was crushing. I’d self-funded my way through university and Bar School, taken on serious debt, and just bought a house. Walking away from my job felt reckless. It was also the only way to survive.
Therapy (and lots of meds!) helped me put myself back together. I became a consultant solicitor, self-employed, working from home, choosing my own clients and hours. For the first time in years, I had control. The guilt lifted. My recovery accelerated. And the fire that first drew me to law, a genuine desire to help people, came roaring back.
I knew that being a consultant wasn’t enough. To make real change, I needed to build something of my own: a firm where mental health and wellbeing weren’t a policy on a shelf, but the reason the business existed, a space where I, and everyone who worked there, could finally be our true selves.
In 2018, Thrive Law was born.
It was within that space, one I’d built to be truly myself in, that I finally understood who that self was. In lockdown in 2020, I was diagnosed with ADHD and later other neurotypes became transparent, and it changed how I understood my entire life. Suddenly, a lifetime of things I’d blamed myself for, the exhaustion of masking, the sensory overwhelm, the way I worked in bursts rather than straight lines, made sense. I wasn’t broken. I was neurodivergent, and I’d spent years trying to function in a world built for a different kind of brain.
That discovery reshaped everything about how I led Thrive Law from that point on. I understood, first-hand, how little most workplaces make room for minds that work differently, and how little support exists for mental health and neurodivergence to be treated with the same seriousness as physical health. I knew I wasn’t the only one. If my lived experience could help employers build workplaces where neurodivergent and struggling minds could actually thrive, then everything I’d been through would have meant something.
Today, Thrive Law is the UK’s leading law firm for mental health and neurodiversity at work. Headquartered in Leeds, with teams in London and the Southwest, we deliver lawyer-led employment law and HR support shaped by lived experience, not just legal theory. Recognised by The Law Society, the SRA and ACAS, we’ve built our reputation on a simple belief: workplaces are better when every brain is allowed to work the way it actually works.
My breakdown almost ended my career. The space I built to survive it is where I discovered who I really am, and that discovery built a firm that’s changing what the legal profession, and every workplace, can be.