First Breaths Underwater

In 2006, while travelling around the world, I visited the Great Barrier Reef out of Cairns, Australia. I was actually quite terrified of the idea of diving in the sea ... where the sharks live, and the only reason I tried it was the GBR, and it cost just $1. It was only a few breaths underwater and I was completely hooked. This photo is from my second dive, because as soon as I got out, I asked to go straight back in again! After that first experience, I started researching where I could learn properly and decided to complete my SSI Open Water in Fiji in early 2007. I trained on a small island in the north, at a quiet resort where I was lucky to have almost one-to-one tuition. Learning to dive in warm, calm water on a tropical island was an extraordinary way to begin. I was on a tiny island in Fiji when I received an invite to interview at Edinburgh University.

Scuba Diving Across the South Pacific

Once certified, I continued diving across the South Pacific, including Rarotonga and French Polynesia. In Moorea, I found myself in the water with sharks, something that had once been a real fear. Yet, instead of fear, I felt fascination, transfixed by their behaviour and the texture of their scales (denticles). After travelling, I returned home and moved to Scotland to begin my Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, living in the Scottish Highlands for three years. During that time, diving was always in the back of my mind, and I made a trip to the Red Sea in Egypt where I did PADI Advanced Open Water.

Diving While Training as a Clinical Psychologist

I realised that if I wanted to dive more often, it would need to be here at home. Towards the end of my training as a psychologist, I took the step into cold water properly, completing my dry suit course in Loch Long and diving out of St Abbs. It was very different from the tropics. I found myself fascinated by how the underwater colours and landscape reflected the terrain I knew from hill walking above the surface, and by the time I graduated in 2010, I knew I wanted to explore UK waters. I have to mention that this is not a photo from the course, its just one of the few I have from when the visibility was good! It's normally a lot darker and murkier than this. I am 99% confident that one of those divers is me. I know that we are hovering over the platform we used for teaching.

Qualified Psychologist and Novice Scuba Diver

Following graduation, I moved from Inverness to Cupar to take up my first qualified role as a clinical psychologist in Fife. I also joined Deep Blue Scuba in Edinburgh, the club I had completed my dry suit course with, and began diving regularly at weekends, mostly at St Abbs and Loch Long. At the time, I was working with people with severe and enduring mental health difficulties, including psychosis and bipolar disorder. I became fascinated by the parallels between what I was learning through psychology and what I was learning through diving. Understanding more about how the brain works made me increasingly curious about what happens to it underwater, including the effects of breathing gases at depth and the similarities I noticed between experiences such as narcosis and psychosis. Psychology and diving were already beginning to connect.

British Diving

Many of my early UK dives were at St Abbs, within the St Abbs and Eyemouth Voluntary Marine Reserve on the east coast of Scotland. It is a beautiful area to dive, with octopus, lobsters, vast beds of brittle stars and walls covered in dead man’s fingers. Sometimes, like on this dive, we were joined by seals. I learned a lot about diving at St Abbs. One of the things I particularly valued about Deep Blue Scuba was how naturally I was given more responsibility as my experience grew. At first I would arrive at the dive site and be paired with an instructor, then with experienced club divers, then with people at a similar level to me, which meant doing more of the navigation and planning ourselves. Eventually, I would turn up and find myself paired with someone less experienced than me. It was a really effective way to progress as a diver, gradually taking on more responsibility as I became ready for it.

NHS Weekdays and Scuba Diving Weekends

During the week, I was building my experience as a clinical psychologist, based in a hospital in central Fife and travelling to clinics across the region to work with people with a range of complex mental health difficulties. At the same time, much of my leisure and social life revolved around diving. As often as I could, I joined club trips to Lochaline, packing up the van and making the long drive into the Highlands to dive the Sound of Mull. We would spend the weekend diving from a charter boat with Lochaline Boat Charters. It was a fantastic place to progress diving, moving from the shallower dives of St Abbs and sheltered waters of Loch Long to deep scenic walls and more challenging wrecks, including the Hispania, the Rondo and the Thesis. My experience as a psychologist and as a diver were developing alongside each other.

Divemaster Training and Guiding in Scotland

Once I felt comfortable with my own diving, I wanted to learn more and improve my skills, so I decided to do my Divemaster course. I hadn't really intended to become a diving professional. It was initially about giving myself more to do and developing my own diving. Becoming a Divemaster trainee, and then a Divemaster, meant assisting on courses and spending much more time underwater. Loch Long became my regular training site, and to date I have dived the A-frames there more than 400 times. Working with other divers also gave me a new perspective. We trained year-round, sometimes taking brand-new divers into cold water, low visibility and the limited daylight of a Scottish winter. I began noticing how people responded to learning under pressure, including anxiety, stress and sometimes panic. Alongside my work as a clinical psychologist, I was becoming increasingly interested in how psychological knowledge could inform the way we support people learning to dive.

Diving the Far North of Scotland

By around 2014, all those dives at Loch Long, St Abbs and the Sound of Mull had given me a solid foundation for more challenging diving. I was lucky enough to join club trips to Scapa Flow in Orkney, and later to Shetland, where I began doing deeper and more demanding dives. At Scapa Flow we dived the German battleships at around 40 metres, as well as blockships in some interesting currents. I was diving on nitrox with a 15-litre cylinder and pony at the time, although I would choose a different setup for those dives now. I was very glad of all the time I had spent developing my skills in the pool and in Scottish waters before taking them there. I loved diving Scapa Flow, not only for the wrecks, but for the marine life. That is something I think can easily be overlooked when people talk about diving there.

Instructor Development Course

In 2015, I took the next step and completed my PADI Instructor Development Course and Instructor Examination in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. I particularly wanted to train with Steve Prior because of his reputation for incorporating an understanding of cognitive processes into the way diving skills are taught and learned. It was a fantastic course with around eight candidates from across the world, including the UK, Canada, France, Lebanon and Egypt. I really enjoyed learning alongside such an international group, and it reflected something I had come to love about diving: the way it brings together people from very different places and backgrounds through a shared interest. And after so much of my diving in cold Scottish waters (guiding/diving all through winter!) its always nice to dive in the Red Sea!

Scuba Diving Instructor in Scotland

I continued diving with Deep Blue Scuba, now as an instructor. That same approach to gradual progression continued. When a new instructor taught their first courses, one of the more senior instructors would act as their Divemaster, providing feedback, guidance and additional support for safety while they developed their teaching skills. I found that a really helpful way to learn. By this point, I had been fascinated by the psychological aspects of diving for a long time, and I wanted to bring more of that knowledge into diver education. I developed my own PADI distinctive speciality, PADI Psychological Diver, which was approved in 2016. This photo is from the very first Psychological Diver course I taught, bringing together my experience as a clinical psychologist, diver and diving instructor in a course for the first time.

Running a Scuba Diving School

By 2015, I had been with Deep Blue Scuba for around five years. When the owner decided to leave, a group of us from within the club came together and put in the money to take it over. It was already a very active and involved social club, and we wanted to keep that community going. The group of us who took over came from very different professional backgrounds, and we were able to draw on that range of skills and experience. That first year was challenging for all of us as we figured out how to run a diving school. Alongside working in the NHS during the week, I was dealing with emails and much of the practical organisation needed to keep the diving running, then spending weekends teaching or guiding dives. Mostly at Loch Long, where I am in this photo. Over time, we built up the club's funds, repaid our original investment and became ordinary club members again. Deep Blue Scuba became an unusual kind of PADI dive club: a non-commercial organisation run by its members.

Career Break to Contemplate Diving Psychology

Around this time, I decided that I wanted to do much more with diving, and particularly with diving psychology. After several very demanding years, I was genuinely burnt out, so I left the NHS, sold my house and got rid of most of my belongings. I was fortunate to be able to take some time out and travelled to Bali for a few months, where I had a chance to relax and think about what I wanted to do next. While I was there, I met up with a friend who had originally certified me as a Divemaster and did some further training, completing TDI Sidemount and Solo Diver courses. I spent time diving in Indonesia and really enjoyed being able to focus on developing my own diving again. I had been reading about digital nomadism and was beginning to think differently about how I might combine psychology, diving and the way I wanted to work.

Teaching and Guiding Scuba Divers in England

After Bali, I came back to stay with family in North East England, where I am originally from, without being completely sure what I wanted to do next. Then I came across Fifth Point Diving Centre, which had recently opened, and there was something very different about the way they approached teaching and training. The centre had its own three-metre-deep training tank, giving us time and space to work with students before moving into open water, as well as somewhere to practise and play ourselves. Courses were paced around the individual student, with an emphasis on things that were increasingly important to me, including taking time over learning, teaching skills neutrally buoyant and caring for the underwater environment. I found myself moving back to the North East largely because a different kind of diving centre had opened nearby. I was teaching regularly again, at the same time as building an online psychology practice ... and then we reached 2020.

The Pandemic

During lockdown, I was fortunate to be living on a family farm, where I found myself a separate room with good internet and was able to build up my remote psychology practice. At the same time, with divers all over the world stuck at home, I began teaching PADI Psychological Diver internationally online. It was an unusual time to connect with divers from different countries when none of us could actually go out and do the thing we loved. I also used that time to develop a course bringing principles from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy into scuba diving. Alongside this, I completed the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh 100-hour assessed Diving Medicine module. Although I am not a medical doctor and do not practise diving medicine, developing my understanding of diving physiology and medicine helped me think much more deeply about where psychology fits within the wider picture of diver health, wellbeing and performance.

Training Scuba Diving Instructors

By the time I joined Fifth Point, I was close to completing the requirements to become a PADI Master Instructor. This qualification reflects accumulated experience, requiring instructors to have taught and certified a substantial number of divers across different courses. I completed the remaining requirements at Fifth Point and became a Master Instructor. My role there included working as a Staff Instructor and helping with Instructor Development Courses. These were a particularly enjoyable part of my time at Fifth Point. I was able to contribute to the training of new instructors and, with the support of the centre, bring some additional psychology into their development too; helping experienced divers learn how to teach and support other people as they became instructors themselves.

"Diving Psychologist"

Gradually, I built up my remote psychology practice while continuing to develop blogs, courses and resources through Fit To Dive, bringing together psychology and scuba diving. As a Clinical Psychologist I specialise in diving, which is interesting, because there is no diving psychology specialism; there are is no training, no professional bodies or even interest groups - so I figure it out as I go and share what I learn. Over the last few years, I have also had opportunities to speak about this work at diving events, including the Human Factors in Diving Conference in Croatia in 2026. Here I am presenting some of my work with divers following distressing or traumatic diving incidents. One of the main approaches I use is Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), a psychological therapy that can help people process traumatic experiences. Where returning to diving is right for that person, my work can also help them return without continuing to carry the additional stress and reactions associated with what happened.

Twenty years of Scuba Diving

I am still diving when I can and intend to keep learning more about diving, the psychology of diving and supporting the psychological wellbeing of divers.