IT was supposed to be the gap year which would ease her into adulthood and prepare her for the rest of her life.
Aileen Corbett packed her bags for Seville in Spain, ready for a year's work as a childminder before setting her mind on a career, probably settling down and later having a family. The future stretched before her. Nothing, it seemed, could go wrong
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Today, 20 years on, Aileen sits in her mother's home in Juniper Green with her daughter, Heather Mann, by her side. At 13, Heather might be expected to be trading school chit chat with her mum or planning their next shopping trip for clothes and shoes.
Instead, the stoic teen is listening to her mum talk of the devastating schizophrenia that emerged in the wake of her gap year adventure.
Aileen tells how it threatened to tear them both apart forever, and Heather then reveals how her mum's experiences have inspired her to raise money and do all she can to make other people understand the true impact of schizophrenia.
"People think someone with schizophrenia is totally different from other people, but they're not," says Heather. "They are just the same. So many people just don't know what it is."
Now 38, Aileen lives in supported accommodation in Morningside while her daughter is cared for by her grandmother and a family friend. It's all long way from that sunny year in Spain.
Aileen was 18 when she returned from Seville, ready to pursue a career in business and language, but something had changed – instead of the lively, artistic, intelligent business and languages student, whose beautiful Scottish landscapes decorate the walls of her mother's home, she was plagued by irrational and uncontrolled thoughts.
"When I came back from Spain everything and everyone had changed," says Aileen. "I thought my friends were talking about me all the time."
The change in lifestyle during that year is thought to have been enough to trigger the schizophrenia that was already lying dormant in Aileen's mind. Later it would send her spiralling into despair – she even tried to take her own life three times.
Her mother, Jenny Robertson, 66, explains: "It is often triggered by something like a change in life or a traumatic event, but the schizophrenia has to be there to begin with. Those events don't cause it, they merely spark it.
"What happened to Aileen was terrible. She was such a bright young girl before that, and this disease has completely ruined her."
Aileen was finally diagnosed when she was 20, before she had the chance to become a mum, and looking after a baby while coping with mental illness was not an option.
Aileen can't recall much of the day Heather was taken into care by social workers, but she was to become aware of the desperate negotiations that went on between her parents – who rushed back to Scotland from Russia where Jenny's husband Stuart was based as a minister – and close friends. They were determined that after being struck by the nightmare of schizophrenia, she wouldn't lose her baby too.
"There's no way I could have handled her going to anyone other than family and friends," says Aileen.
As social workers considered Heather's future, a unique deal was struck. Baby Heather, who was then a year old – would be formally adopted by a friend, who prefers not to be named, while her grandmother Jenny would play a key role in her upbringing.
This meant the little girl could maintain a relationship with her biological mother while being protected from the effects of a devastating mental illness.
The unusual arrangement has worked. Today, Heather contradicts the stereotypes we often have of teenagers, and proud gran Jenny calls her an inspiration.
Heather is so defiant and resolute in support for her mum – whom she calls by her first name – that when she hears people misusing the word "schizophrenia", or even worse "schizo", she readily confronts them.
"I just think it's so stupid," she declares. "A lot of people don't know what they're talking about and when I hear them say things like that I tell them to shut up.
"To me, schizophrenia is part of who my birth mum is.
"There are a lot of myths about it, like people saying schizophrenics are violent but I know that could never happen with her. I'm not afraid of schizophrenia or people with schizophrenia, because I know they can't do me any harm."
She adds: "Obviously I don't remember anything about when I was adopted because I was only a few months old, but I'm so happy that I can see Aileen."
Heather is so determined to help her mother and people like her that she has organised a range of fundraising events which have generated almost £2000, though the Currie Community High School pupil believes raising awareness of what the condition really means is just as important.
Her grandmother adds: "It's truly amazing what she does, she will talk to anyone about it. She even spent time talking to a homeless man who said he'd spent years in a mental hospital and he said what she and her friends were doing was a great thing."
Schizophrenia affects around one in 100 people worldwide with sometimes devastating consequences for the sufferer and their family. It can trigger deep depressions and mood swings, although experts say there are more myths than facts circulating about the disease, such as sufferers have a "split personality".
For Aileen, the suicide attempts were a dramatic low point, but improvement in care and drugs have seen her condition and behaviour level out recent years.
The illness moved Jenny, who has produced 35 books, to write one called Uninvited Guest.
In it, she writes of her daughter as "a young mother who loves her baby but is defenceless against the armies of paranoia, the flaring torches of oppression which invade her being".
The book includes a chapter written by Aileen in which she painfully remembers the terminal change in her life.
"I didn't seem to manage to pick up the threads of my previous life. I was unprepared for the changes I was to encounter in people," she wrote.
"Life seems to have stopped for me somewhere back in Spain. Gradually everybody began to seem to threaten. I felt half foreign in my own country.
"Apart from the incessant inner turmoil, through all the darkness there has been a spiritual struggle."
Today Aileen is at peace with the condition that has threatened to wreak her young life. "In some ways I feel like schizophrenia is quite a beautiful thing for me," she smiles, "because it reminds me of my childhood."
Meanwhile, grandmother and granddaughter are united in their determination to explode the myths surrounding the condition – and reveal the real story behind schizophrenia.
"It's not a 'popular' disease to donate to like cancer is, but it affects so many people," says Jenny. "It has taken more young lives than both world wars put together."
