At the age of 12, Adriene Berkeley’s life was turned upside down by a life-threatening brain infection.

“Meningitis came out of the blue,” she said. “During that time I was having seizures and loss of consciousness. I was not responding to my parents’ voices. I could not recognise anything.”

She was flown to Boston Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, where she hovered between life and death for six months. Sometimes the infection would clear up for a time, then come straight back.

“In the intensive care unit I would be screaming at the nurses,” Dr Berkeley said. “Normally, I am quite reserved.”

The source of the infection was found to be a tiny hole in her mastoid bone, behind her ear. It was letting bacteria from the outside world into her brain. Once that was surgically repaired, she recovered, but found herself changed.

“I grieved quite a bit,” she said. “I was just a little girl when it happened and my childhood had been disrupted. I spent a lot of time in the hospital, close to death.”

The experience triggered a lifelong fascination with the brain and mental health. She went on to study neurology and psychology in England.

She is a psychologist who specialises in neuropsychiatry.

“Psychology and neurology are treated as two separate entities,” she said. “If you compare it to a computer, the mind is like software and the brain is like hardware. To me, they are one and the same.”

After finishing her studies in 2019, she went to work at Southampton General Hospital in Hampshire, England, the southeast trauma centre in the UK.

There, she saw many complex cases that she would likely never have dealt with in Bermuda.

“I saw people who had set themselves on fire,” she said. “I saw people who had swallowed foot-long knives. There were patients who had jumped off buildings.”

She started to get desensitised to suicide attempt cases.

“People trying to end their lives became the norm for me,” she said. “It was nice to return to Bermuda and not be exposed to that as much.”

She moved back to the island in 2019 and opened her practice, PsyNeu, on Queen Street in Hamilton the next year.

“I never saw myself in private practice, not even in training,” Dr Berkeley said. “My university would have these private practice seminars, and I would not go. I did not think I needed them. Then, because of the pandemic, I had no choice but to go out on my own. There were a lot of shifts in employment because of the health crisis.”

Now, her focus is on people who have mental health conditions as a result of neurological conditions, or vice versa.

“That could be dementia, brain injury, stroke, cognitive challenges or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” she said. “I do not do neuropsychological testing but I do do diagnostic testing. If you have a diagnosis, I work with you on your mood. For example, if you have depression after having a stroke, or you have had some cognitive issues after having a brain injury, I would work with you.”

She particularly loves caring for children and teenagers. On the walls of her office there are a number of drawings and sketches made by her young clients. One of her favourites says: “Life is getting better”.

“That drawing is the reason I started putting up all the others I had collected over the years,” she said. “It is just a friendly reminder, and people tend to hone in on it.”

In November, she won the Bermuda Economic Development Corporation’s Wave of Opportunity Pitch Competition for her idea for a mental health practice offering cognitive skills development and emotional wellness services.

“Initially, I had a little self-doubt about entering,” she said. “I was thinking, nobody really cares about mental health or educational needs.”

At the last minute, she decided she would apply and see what happened.

“I was pitching my programme called New Pathways,” she said. “It is essentially a cognitive development programme for children. The focus is typically on children who are neurodiverse or have a specific learning diagnosis.”

Dr Berkeley called it CrossFit for the brain.

“Over a three-month period, we really focus on developing cognitive and emotional skills for anxiety and depression,” she said. “I did a pilot, and it was successful, and all the students improved cognitively. I thought, if I could get some funding I could grow the project.”

During the final round of the pitch competition she was nervous and hard on herself.

“I stumbled on the first three words of the presentation,” she said. “When I sat down, my mother said I did really well. She said no one noticed that I stumbled at the beginning. Inoticed.”

When she won in the Adult category, Dr Berkeley had to really force herself to celebrate the achievement. The prize was $25,000 for her initiative.

“I am really grateful to the BEDC and sponsor Global Atlantic,” she said.

When she first decided to leave her job in England one of the head psychiatrists at the hospital had a strange reaction.

“He said,’ Oh, Bermuda, I used to work there’,” she said. “Then he made this strange sound in his throat, like hmm … I asked him what he meant, but he just said, ‘Oh, you’ll see’.”

She was confused by his reaction at the time, but gets it now.

Working at home in Bermuda for the past four years, she has been shocked by the community’s high level of unresolved trauma, mental health issues and behavioural difficulties.

“It is like there is a burning building and people are casually walking into it like nothing is happening,” she said. “I am standing outside, saying to people, where are you going? The building is on fire. Is it that we are turning a blind eye to the problem or just unaware of what is going on?”

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