Mary-Joy Albutt (known as MJ)

Professional Background

MJ qualified as a registered general nurse (RGN) and registered mental nurse (RMN) at the prestigious Royal London Hospital in 1989. Since then, she has worked in a wide range of health care and teaching settings in public, private, and voluntary sectors.

She has over 15 years’ experience working in care home settings and is currently employed as Head of Dementia Care in a leading private healthcare company. She is currently undertaking a PhD with Worcester University, researching the links between PTSD/ individual trauma and dementia.

Personal Background

Perhaps more impressive than her professional achievements is the fact that she has achieved all of this whilst living with the effects of childhood trauma. At the age of 16, she spent her “gap year” as an inpatient on an acute psychiatric ward – long before there were specialist mental health services for young people.

She spent the next 40 years feeling misunderstood and very frustrated with herself because she could not understand why, whenever things were going well, she went back to her self-sabotaging behaviours.

At the age of 55, everything changed for her. When she had to engage with mental health services for the first time in 12 years, their response to her was totally different; mental health services had changed and become “trauma informed.” Having been silenced, not believed, labelled, and stigmatised for her whole life, suddenly people not only believed her story, but were able to help her understand why all of her symptoms and behaviours made sense in the light of her traumatic past.
With the help of a counsellor, she is now finding out who she really is, embracing her past rather than running from it and experiencing the joy of discovering her authentic self – the person she was always meant to be.

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