In the Netherlands, Lia graduated as a first grade teacher, but never went on to teach at school, in part because her Dutch degree wasn’t valid in Italy, where she went to live from the age of twenty onwards. She worked one year as an au-pair girl in Florence, Italy, and afterwards went to live in Turin, Italy, where she worked for almost twenty years as a part-time (and two years as a full-time) multilingual secretary, and also occasionally as a freelance translator. In 1981, she graduated with a degree in Pedagogy, though this was never used for a job. After her forced hospitalization in 1998, she never returned to work. The title of Lia’s book is Healing from schizophrenia: A personal account, published at Lulu.com, and available on Amazon and other libraries online (ISBN 9781446787748).
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