MAXINE'S SWEET SUCCESS 'I WASN'T HAPPY IN MY DREAM JOB'

After battling depression and anxiety, the Wellington pastry chef is now teaching others

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It happened in the chocolate room. Not the place you'd expect to hit rock bottom, but for Wellington pastry chef Maxine Scheckter, then just 22 and already working at a world-famous restaurant, it was where she finally fell apart.

The past few years had been madness – training at the Ferrandi culinary school in Paris, and jobs at world-class restaurants in France and England. She was a superstar in the making, but inside she was suffering.

Since her early teens, Maxine had experienced chronic migraines and "a constant feeling of dread, a knot in my stomach". She would pick at her skin, bite her nails and pull them off. At the time, neither she nor her parents recognised it was anxiety.

"I spent so long trying to deny it," says Maxine, 29. "Now I know that doesn't work."

Things got dramatically worse when she got a job at a top London restaurant, which she chooses not to name. It was a "toxic workplace", where Maxine and her colleagues endured abuse and sexual harassment by a "horrendous" head chef.

"I was definitely depressed before then, but it exacerbated my mental health struggles." She left the job, realising it wasn't worth the misery. Then came an unbelievable offer - a position at celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal’s three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant.