Six years ago, Margaret Ross had retreated into her house to die, weighed down by the terrible burden of alcoholism. Now she's a bright-eyed, bustling woman working with the city's authorities to raise awareness of mental health issues. As part of our week-long series on Framework, she tells JENNIFER SCOTT how much she owes the charity

SIT at the back and you'll barely see her.

We're in the function room of a Notts stately home – a vast space that echoes with the clatter of hundreds of smartly-dressed people, seated at round tables.

On a platform at the front, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Radio Nottingham's John Holmes, stands Margaret Ross. A tiny woman. Bird-like. One gust of wind, you think, would blow her away.

But Margaret, it materialises, is made of sterner stuff. Life has had a good go at blowing her away. But she's still here. Despite her diminutive stature, she's standing tall.

Margaret and John are co-presenters at the annual meeting of Framework – a Notts-based charity that supports the vulnerable and the homeless. John is a strong supporter of the charity. Margaret, 50, is a former service user, now a volunteer. She's nervous – it's the first time she's spoken to this many people. But you would never guess. She addresses the room with warmth and confidence. Her brown eyes sparkle. Margaret has got her life back.

Six years ago, if you'd knocked on the door of Margaret's house, she would not have answered. The curtains would all have been drawn. You'd have thought nobody was home.

Inside Margaret would have been sat, staring at the walls, clutching her terrible secret to herself. The secret came in cans and bottles. It had lost her her family and her jobs and destroyed her health.

"Either you drive people away or people don't want to be around you anyway."

Her body was emaciated; she never ate. She simply sat, trying to force drops of booze down her burnt-out throat which was corroded by years of drink.

She had no wish to continue living. She had attempted suicide more times than she can remember. But people kept finding her; saving her. She would be admitted to a psychiatric ward before being sent back home where the cycle continued.

"I would think, 'I'm not even any good at killing myself'," she remarks, dryly.

Margaret's tragedy arose out of the miners' strike.

She was a young bride, married at 18 to a miner at a local pit. At 19, she had a son and the family bought a three-bedroom detached house in the area.

Then, the strike. Margaret's husband joined the pickets. She had a good job in an accounts department. She was very capable; smartly-dressed. She began to take on more and more overtime. She would leave for work at 5am. And the pressure began to tell.

At first, the cans of lager were a way of relaxing. Just a few, after work. Then, alongside the cans, there were bottles sneaked around in handbags. Vodka and orange, swigged from a pop bottle.

People became a problem. She suspected they all knew.

She gave up going to the pub with her friends because she needed a drink just to face them. She would have panic attacks. Getting to work would take forever; she would disembark one bus, thinking she was going to wet herself, then have to wait for the next one, before doing the same thing a few minutes later. In 1986, she gave up her job, unable to function.

Eventually, she woke up one morning with her need for a drink sending tremors through her entire body.

She rang the Nottingham Clinic, now the Priory, and went in for six weeks in 1989.

Her husband, who had remained supportive throughout, got a new job in a different area. It was a fresh start for them. Margaret was off the booze and had a new job. And the couple had had another son.

Then, after 10 years, things began to fall apart once more. In October 1999, her husband left.

The family home, in Notts, was sold at a loss. Margaret, the once-proud office worker, found herself reclassified "homeless" and was put into local authority housing.

Three weeks after her marriage collapsed, Margaret's father died from stomach cancer.

She found herself locked in a cycle of depression. She walked out of her job and tried to get back in touch with the Nottingham Clinic but, because she no longer lived in the area, she was told she couldn't access it. She had no idea where to turn. She had initially been granted custody of her younger son but he went to live with his dad when she couldn't cope.

Life slowly slipped away. The house was filthy. The booze was delivered, because she couldn't go out. And the suicide attempts began.

She wanted to be invisible. She couldn't bear to look at herself in the mirror: "I didn't see me any more. I saw this pathetic creature."

During one of her visits to the psychiatric ward in Worksop, she remembers trying to add up her bank statement. She was a penny out and she couldn't find it anywhere. To the once-orderly Margaret, this was unbearable. "It was awful. I was doing it over and over and crying and saying, 'Where is it? Where IS it?' It was a penny!"

In 2003, Margaret rang Framework. Bills lay unopened on her doormat. Debts had spiraled.

Her mum heard about Framework through a friend and suggested they might help her daughter.

For Margaret, it was no longer about trying to reorder her life so she could live it. She simply wanted a tidy death.

During that first call, she could barely speak. She was crying. A small voice croaked: "I don't know if you can help me or not..."

They could. They got a psychiatrist's report and prepared a risk assessment. "They said the biggest danger I posed was to myself," she recalls.

She was assigned a case worker, Maggie – "a little terrier" – with a big heart and a dreadful line in jokes. They arranged a special, coded knock, so Margaret would know who it was at the door.

Maggie helped arrange payment plans, tidy the house. She would call around three times a week for three years, coaxing Margaret out on shopping trips.

And slowly, Margaret learned to smile again. It hurt so much at first. The corners of her mouth were permanently turned down through lack of use.

She quit the booze for good over Christmas 2004. It was a wretched, lonely plummet.

But, in five years, she hasn't touched alcohol. She has been left with arthritis and brittle bones. She's on various antidepressants – probably for the rest of her life. If she's sinking particularly low, she can recognise the signs and will take a "keep well day" in bed. If it runs into three days, she contacts her GP.

But, in many more ways, Margaret's life is what she never dreamed it could be – normal. She has moved back to Carlton, to be near her sisters and her mum. And she has rekindled her relationship with her sons.

"Oh, I see them now," she says, voice catching. "They both survived this."

The rest of Margaret's time is devoted to volunteering for Framework, the charity that handed her salvation.

Sometimes she does admin. At other times she works as a co-trainer on a new Framework programme called Changing Your Mind.

She addresses groups of up to 50 people from Nottingham's ranks of officialdom (Nottingham City Homes, the magistrates, Notts Police and Trading Standards) about her experiences.

The idea is to raise awareness of mental illness in workplaces so it can be more widely recognised and understood.

"We try to show how normal mental health problems are," explains Margaret. "The feedback has been tremendous."

Nowadays, Margaret laughs a lot with her Framework colleagues. They know her. There's nothing to hide.

"People know my issues. It's not that I'm mollycoddled. But I'm not hiding any more."

And, perhaps one of her crowning achievements is evident, even if you're sitting quite far away from Margaret as she takes to the stage at the Framework Annual Meeting.

For even if you can't see her – even if you can only hear her calm, contained voice, the fact remains – you would never guess that this was her story.