GREAT creative activity often comes at great cost to the people involved. History is littered with the names of people who have done great things in vastly different fields of endeavour but are linked by one common factor.

Mozart, Beethoven, van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill and Spike Milligan represent an ill-assorted bunch but all suffered from a form of mental illness that sent their personal lives spinning from peaks of creative genius into depths of black despair.

Churchill called it his "black dog." The psychiatrists, until recently, called it manic depression. Today, it is "mixed state effective disorder."

Whatever it is called, Loretta Gooch has it, doesn't mind admitting it, and has spent the past few years in Hellifield coming to terms with it.

She volunteered to talk to me because she hopes that, by being honest about mental illness and its effects, she may help people out there who are suffering in silence, living in fear of the stigma still associated with such diseases.

Loretta, 56 this month, does not claim to be a genius. She raised her eyebrows, and then laughed out loud when I mentioned some of the names above, but as a child she showed immense promise as a mathematician.

As a child on a North London council estate, she was the only local lass to pass the 11-plus to go to grammar school. From there, she was transferred to another school for very bright children.

She did her O levels at 14, her As at 16, and went off to Brunel University in the 1960s to study maths and engineering - the only female among several hundred lads.

But even before she got to college, she had begun to suffer long spells of dizzy, wild behaviour. This was, of course, the Swinging Sixties and although until then she had been what she calls "a goody two-shoes", she decided she must try sex - and got pregnant the very first time.

This she concealed from the college authorities, which meant her parents looking after the baby while she commuted two hours each way every day - and acted as mum in the early mornings and late evenings.

She graduated but could not get a job in engineering - "no-one had ever heard of a woman engineer in those days" - but instead got married to a much older man and had two more children.

But her ever-active brain did not settle to the life of a housewife, which is why she first came north. She had a degree in maths, which schools were then, and still are, screaming for in teachers, so she went to the then Huddersfield poly to get her teaching qualifications.

For the next few years, she taught in some grim, inner-city comprehensives in Yorkshire and then Manchester until, one day in Manchester, she went down with what the doctors said was glandular fever and ended up in hospital.

She seemingly recovered, then relapsed. This time, blood tests showed that her problem was not glandular at all. "You're suffering from acute stress," said the medics who registered her illness as acute anxiety neurosis.

"I was absolutely furious," she told me at the Village Well meeting centre in Hellifield, which was opened mainly thanks to her efforts last October. "I was certainly not going to admit that I could be mentally ill. That, as I discovered much later, was another major mistake."

This led to another crazy period of her life. She moved back and forth between the North and London - moving house five times in only a few months - and then her husband died.

"He had been much older than me, so I should have been expecting it," she says with great sadness. "I perhaps should have paid him more attention. But my own life was in such turmoil that I couldn't concentrate on myself, never mind other people."

Alone with teenage children, she turned for help to a man who had been on her same teaching course at Huddersfield, David Gooch, who was to go on to run a computer training business from his home in Hellifield. This was one of her better decisions.

"David was absolutely marvellous," she says. "With him to lean on, I was able to come to terms with the fact that I was, indeed, mentally ill - but that did not mean than I couldn't live a nearly normal life."

They married and at last firmly anchored to a strong home base, she began to venture out into the world again. She volunteered to take the minutes at meetings of Craven Mind, the mental health support group, and then became its secretary.

Last October, with the help of the local doctor's surgery, she led the opening of the Village Well, linked with similar community groups in Bentham and Settle, and is now as busy as the proverbial bee.

"Voluntary work is very therapeutic for people with mental health problems," she says. "It allows you so get back a sense of self-worth. That, in turn, allows sufferers to come to terms with the fact that they just have an illness - just like arthritis or backache - but that does prevent them from leading a full life.

"Having a super partner is a great help too. But if there is any benefit for other people in my talking to you, it is to say: 'Don't suffer in silence.' I know just how terrible that is. There are people here anxious to help. Get in touch."

If you are worried about possible mental health problems, or would like more information about the Village Well, please ring 01729-851376.