Nicola’s Story

MY JOURNEY TO POWER TO THE KIDS

Hi! My name is Nicola Holmes and I grew up in Coffs Harbour. After completing my medical degree in Newcastle and working overseas for several years I returned to my childhood city to raise a family and practice medicine in my community.

It has been a remarkable place to raise my three children now aged 20,18 and 15. Journey as a parent I share and interweave with evidence-based practice when talking to parent groups at local primary schools. Supporting parents to in turn support their children to thrive is a personal passion of mine that has arisen out of 15 years of focussing on managing mental health issues in youth.

I recently completed a project to fit out a campervan with my daughter Heather. The experience of developing manual skills of woodworking, problem-solving and creating has been a fabulous experience in connecting and relationship building, I highly recommend joint activities to strengthen attachment and provide opportunities to develop open communication.

I spent 10 years working at Headspace Coffs Harbour which is a federally funded youth clinic helping 12-25 year olds mental health difficulties. During that time I saw a significant increase in psychological distress in youth and increasingly complex presentations including severe social anxiety, coexisting autism and ADHD, attachment traumas, gender dysphoria and eating disorders. I witnessed first-hand the enormous impact on the life trajectory of youth with high ACE scores (adverse childhood experiences).

In this setting working with adolescents who were struggling I realised that intervention needed to be directed earlier up the stream in the development of difficulties. This prompted me 5 years ago to start delivering free seminars to parents of local primary school children, hoping to make a difference at a grassroots level, empowering family members to recognise and improve mental health outcomes in a group where very little professional help is available.

One such evening at Mullaway Primary School was particularly well received and a colleague and friend Dr Annemarie Winters and Greg Williams (P and C president) approached me afterwards and enquired if I would be interested in doing more such events with a longer focus of reaching more parents and broadening the scope of skills we could teach them.

Annemarie and Greg obviously shared my passion for teaching and empowering families and together they have brainstormed and driven this project. I am excited to be on board as part of the education team. I bring to the group extensive personal experience in supporting youth with high levels of mental health distress, my own parenting journey and education experience gained from 10 years working with North Coast GP training (educating trainee GPs) and 4 years with the Black Dog Institute training mental health skills to GPs and psychologists.