Eleanor Symmers (née Farrell)

After graduating MB ChB from Glasgow University in 1965, Eleanor Symmers (née Farrell) trained from 1967 at University College Hospital and the Tavistock Clinic in London, where the psychodynamic and psychotherapeutic approaches were favoured. This interest and direction lasted a lifetime. She married in 1969, after which her career was influenced by her husband’s GP training posts, and commitments to family. Moving to Edinburgh in 1978, she was able to resume psychiatry at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, from where she took an interesting diversion from 1984 to 1989. At the Edinburgh Breast Screening Unit she gave psychological support and insights to patients diagnosed with breast cancer by mammography. She contributed to several new studies improving communication and management of those women in the early stages of the UK trial, which preceded the UK national mammography programme. This she regarded as the most rewarding stage of her career.

Return to psychiatry was funded by participation in the Tribunals Service. Psychoanalytical training was almost completed when she diagnosed her own subarachnoid haemorrhage in March 1996; operative intervention led to full recovery. Such was her devotion to the Tavistock Clinic’s beliefs that from 2001 she attended a two year course that entailed weekly trips to London, returning the following day to work in the Community Rehabilitation Unit in Edinburgh. She retired in 2003.

In October 2009 a brain tumour was diagnosed, yet she marked several key family events before dying on 6 May 2010.

She is survived by her father (aged 94) and by her husband, Bill, and their three children and six grandchildren.