Sara Trevelyan
Sara Trevelyan graduated as a medical doctor in 1977 at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. She married Jimmy Boyle when he was an inmate in the Barlinnie Special Unit in 1980. After working in hospitals and medicine briefly, she left to explore mental health in the community. She is a psychotherapist and interfaith minister and lives and works between Edinburgh and Findhorn in Scotland.
Areas of interest
- Penal Reform
- Interfaith Ministry
- Therapeutic Communities
Sara Trevelyan is a fervent believer in the power of arts and therapeutic community to transform lives. She first trained as a doctor and worked as a psychiatrist before moving to community mental health, and retraining as a psychotherapist. Sara hit the headlines in 1980 when she married ex-husband and father of her children, Jimmy Boyle, while he was serving a sentence for murder in the Barlinnie Special Unit in Glasgow.
“”The unit which would accommodate up to ten prisoners was intended to have an explicitly psychiatric orientation, making use of group counselling, drug therapy and creating a therapist/ patient relationship between staff and prisoners. Such was the crisis of violence in Scottish prisons that this proposal had the full personal backing of the Secretary of State for Scotland, and the controller of Scottish Prisons at that time.
The special unit had ten cells, a kitchen, the governor’s office, an officers’ meeting room, a surgery, the community meeting room and several rooms which were subsequently used as workshops for the arts. The room designated as the solitary confinement cell ended up being used as the sculpture studio. There was also an outside courtyard, where the sculpting of larger pieces was eventually to take place, a small garden, and a greenhouse.
These were patients with fascinating social histories full of examples of trauma, bereavements, and other life stresses which had contributed to their eventual breakdown and hospital admission. The only recourse seemed to be to prescribe drugs, or in more severe cases administer ECT (electro convulsive therapy). The words therapy or healing, as far as my memory goes, were never mentioned. Across the board a defining separation was made – between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It was this invisible divide, which society as a whole also extends to the prison system, which I was challenging through my ongoing relationship with Jimmy.
A renewed sense of hope arose with an experiment which showed that genuine rehabilitation is possible with a different approach – a message which is as relevant today with the present crisis in prisons as it was back then at the end of the 1970s.”
Jimmy and Sara and Jimmy went on to co-found the Gateway Exchange a community centre in Edinburgh that aimed to continue the spirit of the Special Unit – offering creative opportunities to former prisoners, recovering addicts, and people experiencing emotional distress. Sara re-trained in counselling and psychotherapy in the Person Centred Approach and has worked as a therapist for many years, integrating transpersonal approaches.
Sara has also contributed to a new retrospective of the Barlinnie Special Unit, where she shares first-hand reflections on this landmark therapeutic experiment and on the Gateway Exchange.
All that I have lived in my life leads me to believe that with wisdom and compassion we can heal our relationship with ourselves, our loved ones, and our world
