Kitty & Alex Tait

Welcome to Proper Mental episode 89 with Kitty & Alex Tait who are the owners of The Orange Bakery and the authors of Bread Song.

Kitty started to struggle with her mental health around the age 14 to the point where she had to stop going to school.

As well as contact with CAHMS, her family tried all sorts of things to support and distract her but nothing seemed to help until she watched her father, Alex, baking bread.

The process of preparing and baking bread started to bring Kitty comfort and have an incredible impact on her mental health and it wasn’t long before she was sleeping in the kitchen, borrowing oven space from the neighbours and making enough bread to feed the whole street.

This would lead to Alex leaving his job and working with Kitty to launch The Orange Bakery which instantly became a much-loved feature in the local community.

Kitty and Al joined me to chat about Kitty’s mental health struggles from both their perspectives.

We chat about baking and how it became so vital to Kitty’s mental health, we chat about the importance of having a creative outlet, being part of a community and doing nice things for other people.

You can connect with Kitty & Al on social media on any of the following

@the_orangebakery

@kittytaitbaker

@kittys.kits

@breadsong.bakes

Or via their website www.theorangebakery.org

You can catch up with me at www.propermentalpodcast.com  or connect with me via social media @propermentalpodcast.

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Thanks for listening!