Our Story
The Joshi Project is named for our beautiful, brilliant and gifted daughter, who died in 2020, aged 24. Her tragic, final moments came after a lifetime of struggle against deep depressions, high anxiety and punishing OCD rituals, along with the persistent abandonment and failure of mental health professionals, who did not provide the care and support she sought and desperately needed to live.
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She was as smart and creative as they come and surrounded by the love of everyone whose life she touched – but it wasn’t enough.
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I have no doubt that Joshi’s life could have been saved had she had access to the right kind of support.
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The purpose of The Joshi Project is to introduce a more compassionate and flexible system of mental health care in Scotland, aimed at helping the thousands – probably tens of thousands – of people like Joshi, who have so much to give the world, but are stymied and oppressed by the confines of a system without vision.
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She was naturally intelligent, creative and highly analytical, and she showed truly astonishing language skills from an early age.
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She left behind a small mountain of beautiful and heart-wrenching poetry and she was also a lover of Shakespeare. Her potential seemed limitless – not just to her doting dad, but to everyone whose life she touched.
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Yet nowhere was she given the mental health support she sought and desperately needed to live.
From the age of about 12, they prescribed her increasing doses of medication. They also gave her cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). None of it helped. In fact, Joshi hated the medication. She understood very well that they robbed her of the spark that made her the extraordinary person she was.
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When she complained to doctors about how the drugs made her feel, they simply upped the dosage, or tried other psychiatric drugs. And when the CBT didn’t work, they blamed her for not trying hard enough. She was at a loss, and so were her parents.
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Ultimately, the head of psychiatry at the Scottish hospital where Joshi was being treated literally threw his arms in the air and exclaimed: “We have nothing left in our armory for her.”
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I am forever haunted and devastated by those words – but unwittingly this arrogant little man had put his finger on the biggest failure of our current system of mental health care and treatment. There is not enough flexibility.
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We need a system that’s not focused on the poorly understood perceived problems with patients’ brain chemical, but rather one that’s flexible at every turn, according to patients’ needs.
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It is in Joshi’s name and with her inspiration that we continue to push for much-needed change.
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To learn more about Joshi’s story and how we formed our charity, you can click here to read the article I wrote for Ther Herald Magazine in 2021 and transcript of the talk I have gave to 3rd year psychiatric nursing students at the University of the Highlands and Islands in November 2024.
Mark S. Smith