On adversity, adaptation and what comes next.
Hello! I'm Suzanne, a writer, mentor and speaker, and I've spent the last decade supporting parents like me who have found themselves in the depths of adversity, in their own lives and within their families. I believe in the power of us as parents, and as people in our own right, to make small shifts that ripple through families and generations. With a compassionate approach and a love of metaphor, I write about how we live through adversity without losing ourselves and what happens to us after life has changed us.
I've seen first hand how a good framework can help us as we make sense of the nonsensical, and I created the Partnering Not Parenting and Adversity Parenting models from my lived and learned experiences to do just that. I mentor parents going through adversity individually and in small groups, and offer a number of supported programmes as well as affordable, self-guided resources you can use in your own time. I'm bringing more of my work together here over the coming weeks and if you sign up below, you'll be notified when new things are available.
And for a bit of background, I've started and run marketing and software businesses over the last 30 years. After my daughter's mental health crisis, I founded Parenting Mental Health in 2016. What began as a Facebook group grew into a global community and charity that supported almost 50,000 parents. I left Parenting Mental Health in 2025 and the community continues today as Sunflower Parent Support (opens in a new tab) on Facebook. During that time, I was selected as one of Facebook's 100 most meaningful community leaders, and my book Never Let Go: How to Parent Your Child Through Mental Illness was published by Penguin Random House in 2020.
I am now focused on writing on Substack while my next book emerges, and creating new support and in-person events for 2027. You can read the latest essay and my archive by clicking on the orange button below. Or you can sign up for email updates via the second button.
Read The Daily Ramble (opens in a new tab) Hear more from Suzanne (opens in a new tab)
The book
Never Let Go
How to Parent Your Child Through Mental Illness. Published in 2020 by Vermilion, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Never Let Go came out of the hardest years of my life, and of my daughter's. It is a book about parenting a child through a mental health crisis, about staying close when everything tells you to retreat, and about what it costs to keep holding on.
Buy the book (opens in a new tab)Also at Audible (opens in a new tab), Blackwell's (opens in a new tab), Google Books (opens in a new tab) and Penguin (opens in a new tab).
Contact
If you would like to talk about mentoring, speaking, or anything you have read, write to me. I'd love to hear from you!