I’m not an amazing athlete, I only run two or three miles every second day.  I’ve done a 10K women’s race, but nothing too strenuous. I started about four years ago – the idea was to lose some weight but mentally I’ve found it is really good for me.

During the latest bout of depression last year I found for the first couple of weeks I couldn’t go out and run or do anything but after a while I decided to give it a try. I said to myself, ‘I can still do the things I enjoy doing.’

I have had depression off and on during the years, the first time was 26 years ago just after the birth of my second child.  I can be fine for five or ten years at a time.  Other people have coping mechanisms, but I don’t seem to have them. The only way I can describe my depression is that its like having a black cloud enveloping me.

I recognise the symptoms of depression and go to my GP.  This time I was delighted to get the option of the ‘doing well’ programme.  Talking through things helped me and gave me the confidence despite the depression to continue with my running.  As a result I’m sure the length of depression was much shorter than it has been in the past.

It’s nothing official, there’s just a group of us who meet every week and sometimes we call ourselves the Therapy Club.

We’ve been friends for ever some of us, we grew up together. But I guess we’ve been meeting regularly for the past ten or 15 years and in that time many of us have experienced depression ourselves.

We’ve found that if someone is going along a course of thinking, you can get them to think in a different way and take their mind off how they are feeling. Just by talking about things.

Depression makes your horizons shrink, and when it is really bad the horizon is shrunk right down to your toes. It helps then to have someone who understands, to jolly you along.

Because I don’t like to think I’ll never go down again. I probably will. So it’s good to think there are people around you ready to help when it does happen. It is very, very important to have friends like that.

I get things from them I can’t get from my own family. Maybe it’s about me wanting to appear strong but my family don’t know too much about my depression and I don’t tell them. I’d hate for them to treat me differently, or for them not to come to me when they need support.

I do take medication – off an on. But as well as talk, I find exercise is vital, it really helps. I swim and attend a fitness class twice a week they call circuit training, which isn’t as tough as it sounds.

Mind you, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s a piece of cake. Coming through depression is really hard.

I’d challenge anyone to say they’d got lower than me. I suffered six deaths in quick succession, people from different generations, including a young cousin who died in their early 20s and my girlfriend.

I’d not worked for a couple of years while I was looking after her, and then I found myself on my own, with no where to stay – because the flat had been in her name - and ostracised from my girlfriend’s family because they just didn’t want to know me.

This was over ten years ago: I drove into a lay-by, I connected the exhaust pipe to the car cabin and I was ready to end it there and then. But I didn’t, I decided to go for help, instead.

I walked into the social work department and asked to see someone. They were very polite, I explained what I’d been going through for ten minutes, but then they told me ‘sorry, we’ve no one qualified to deal with you.’

I tried another couple of places too, but there was nothing quite right – and I didn’t want to go on drugs but I went to the doctor and she suggested I use beta blockers. They keep me calm. The next thing I did was buy a caravan and head south. I spent a year walking along a beach. This was my time off work, if you like. It helped me get myself together and when I came back north.

I retrained in desktop publishing and that’s led to a couple of jobs, but I’ve left those on my own – I have other health problems too – but as Clint Eastwood said: ‘A man’s got to know his own limitations.’ I’ve learned to know how much I can cope with, and if I’m within those boundaries I can deal with the day to day.

Going to Doing Well, has helped in that. Therapy has given me someone to talk to, someone who knows what they are talking about, but who isn’t in your immediate family. I just wish they’d been around ten years ago, because I really needed them then.