Depression UK

How we can help

Depression UK promotes mutual support between individuals affected by or at risk from depression, with the aim of encouraging self help, recovery and personal growth.

We try to help our members by enabling them to share their thoughts and problems with fellow sufferers, because they know better than any non-depressed professional or carer does what it really feels like to suffer from depression.

Our aims are to

• Offer fellowship (friendliness), to anyone troubled by depression, to help him or her overcome their illness.
• Offer mutual support and encourage self help.
• Overcome the isolation felt by many people with depression.
• Help break down the stigma attached to this illness.
• Maintain the confidentiality of members at all times.
• Attempt to meet the needs of sufferers not covered by health professionals.
• Neither give medical advice nor endorse any medical treatment or product.

Support Us

Volunteer Vacancies

Any help or support you can give will be gratefully received. Just a few hours on a regular basis can make all the difference. Even the distribution of a few leaflets to your local library, doctor’s surgery, hospital etc., would help us publicise our charity’s work. There are many ways in which active help in running the charity can be given. There is, inevitably, quite a lot of administration involved and we would like to have a small team of people sharing these small tasks to ease the load. Other areas where we need more help are our Penfriend Scheme, Social Media, Publicity Material, Marketing & Coordinating Website updates, and so on. We do need to meet our volunteers, so we always ask people who volunteer for us to initially attend one of our committee meetings. It provides an opportunity to find out what you’d like to do for us and gives you a chance to make sure you really want to do this before you commit to anything. Committee meetings take place monthly via Video Conferencing. None of our volunteers are paid for their time but are refunded reasonable expenses.

Set up your own Support Group

You can set up your own support group in your area and as a charity, we will support you. We can offer this support by helping you to find people to join your support group and we can also provide initial financial support (for example, for the cost of booking venues or for promotional use). Importantly, your support group needs to eventually become financially stable without our backing, but we will support you with this also.

If you are interested, please email info@depressionuk.org and request a support group application form.