It was not until Emma was on the verge of killing herself that she realised that the crippling despair with which she had lived since she was 11 was not normal. “It was a bit like when there’s snow on the ground,” she said. “Everything was really muffled. But when I was a kid, I just thought that was what life was like.”

Triggered by a childhood of sexual abuse and compounded by a lack of medical support, Emma, now 22 and living in Leeds, spent more than a decade struggling under the blanket of depression. “None of the doctors took it seriously,” she said. “All I got were antidepressants.”

When one doctor sent her for counselling eventually, it was to the same room in the centre where she had given testimony against her abuser. She refused to go.

Today Emma struggles with the events of her teenage years: her erratic stints in support programmes, her swings between mild to severe depression, the deaths of her grandmother and mother.

“It’s all jumbled up,” she said. “I was so cut off. I didn’t care about anything. I could have won the lottery and become a millionaire and it wouldn’t have affected me.”

It was at a Leeds-based charity, the Marketplace Project, that Emma finally found the help she needed; 18 months on and she is about to graduate from Leeds College of Art and Design with a degree in furniture design.

In July she is taking her work to the New Designers exhibition in London. In August she is getting married. “It looks like everything is finally starting for me. I feel I have earned the right to be me; to be happy,” she said.

To other children still suffering, her message was: “Hang in there. Life gets so much better.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Looking for romance on the Blairs' love bus
• Children 'immersed in culture of violence'
• Hunt for black gold sweeps the country