Helen Nicolson (child psychiatrist)

Nicolson married later in life, in 1967, Tom Nicolson, a botanist, and became stepmother to his two children. When she retired in the 1980s they moved to his native Shetland, where she lived until his death in 2005. She returned to Perth and became a Quaker, which she said related to her mother's interest in Quakerism in her early life; other sources put her interest down to the influence of Professor Court. It was reported that she told an East of Scotland meeting, that her early childhood 'in a country where everyone had a religion' was something she regarded as 'fortunate' in seeing religious practices intertwined with everyday life, and in her later school years church was part of the weekly routines.

Her own career involved founding a child and family psychiatry department in Dundee, after taking a psychotherapy course in Aberdeen. Nicolson's innovative service grew to expand across the area, from 1965 to her retirement in the 1980s, to having several clinical and community units in Dundee and Perth, including the first adolescent in-patient service.

She then studied medicine (graduating in 1948) studying at St. Andrews University and Manchester and Newcastle, where she became involved later in what was a new discipline of child psychiatry, under Quaker Professor Donald Court.

Helen Nicolson (1924–2021), born Helen Mathewson, was a founding psychiatrist consultant of the innovative Dundee department of child and family psychiatry (1965–1980s). She applied a psychodynamic approach and led a multidisciplinary team in understanding family dynamics, child behaviour and using different theoretical approaches, and taught her empathetic approach to many doctors.