Unedited Minds Consultancy with Kirstie Pickles

Unedited Minds is a small UK consultancy, set up in 2024 by Kirstie Pickles, that trains workplaces to understand neurodivergent staff and to look after mental health. Its home ground is the veterinary profession, where Pickles practises as an equine internal medicine specialist — a Glasgow graduate of 1996 with RCVS and European Diplomate status — and its most useful audience is practice owners, managers and clinical teams who need to know what reasonable adjustments look like on a busy clinic floor rather than in an office handbook.

Pickles was diagnosed autistic in her forties, and that experience sits beside a formal grounding in the subject. She holds a postgraduate certificate in counselling skills and a coaching qualification, is a Mental Health First Aid instructor, trained as a deliverer of the NHS England-commissioned National Autism Trainer Programme, and is a trustee of Vetlife, the profession's mental health charity. In 2021 she and Nottingham Vet School's Brad Hill won the RCVS Mind Matters Initiative's Sarah Brown grant to study the workplace stressors faced by autistic vets, and that research — later published — is the backbone of her training. It covers what autism can look like at work, routes to diagnosis, common stressors, and how employers and employees can approach adjustment requests under the Equality Act 2010.

The work runs across neurodiversity courses, mental health training and workshops including the Mental Health First Aider course, consultancy for organisations, and one-to-one coaching. Pickles has delivered sessions for the Society of Practising Veterinary Surgeons and a webinar for CVS Veterinary Group, and has spoken at BVA Live. The published track record sits almost wholly within veterinary and animal-health workplaces, though the consultancy offer is framed for organisations generally. Fees are not published, so an organisation from outside the sector would do well to ask directly how the material adapts to its own setting.