A man who walked his way back to health after suffering depression has written a book about the experience to help other people suffering mental health problems.
Retired journalist Richard Harris will be giving all profits made by his book – Walking Back To Happiness – to Carlisle Eden Mind, the charity that supports people with mental health problems in Carlisle, Eden and north Cumbria.
Richard, of How Mill, near Brampton, said he always thought depression was ‘something other people got’ – until he realised that he had got it himself.
His GP suggested he should embark on ‘some big daft project’ to banish the negative thoughts that were filling his head, so he embarked on a series of walks in places chosen for him by an online random postcode generator.
The generator would throw up any postcode at random from anywhere in the Carlisle (CA) postcode area, and he would go for a walk there – no matter how unlikely or unpromising it appeared to be.
He would then return home and write about it – the writing (and the publishing of the resulting book) being as much a part of his therapy as the walking.
He said: “During my 55-year career as a journalist I discovered that everyone I met was interesting if you asked the right questions and listened to their answers.
“My random postcode walks gave me the chance to find out whether that was equally true of places – that everywhere is interesting if you look hard enough.”
Richard completed 12 walks across north Cumbria, including several in the Eden Valley, and found that, no matter how unpromising some of them appeared to be, every one did indeed have something interesting about it. And, more important, he said, it was largely thanks to his random postcode walks that he was now ’90 per cent back to normal.’
He added: “It started just as a way of taking my mind off the misery of depression and it certainly did that . . . but to my surprise it also turned into one of the best things I have ever done.
“There is something surprisingly thrilling to be sitting at your breakfast table knowing that you will be spending your day walking in some place but not knowing where and something surprisingly liberating in having a computer decide exactly where that walk will take you.”
