Guardian highlights role of food gardens in combating depression
As part of a series of features for Mental Health Awareness week, the Guardian has provided detailed coverage of the Growing Health campaign, which has been demonstrating how food growing projects are helping to overcome mental health issues.
In their article 'Green therapy: how gardening is being used to fight depression' they show how gardens, such as Sydenham Garden are boosting wellbeing with weekly therapeutic gardening sessions. One volunteer recalls that her GP had suggested visiting the garden to help with her depression; “he thought gardening would be good for me. He was right”.
The feature also covers how Growing Health, a campaign of Sustain and Garden Organic funded by the Tudor Trust, has been collecting and sharing the evidence as well as building 'a growing movement' to ensure food growing and gardening will be used routinely by the health service in the future.
One key opportunity mentioned is the growth of social prescribing. Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, Chair of the Royal College of GP's is quoted as saying 'GP's have been keen for years to adopt various forms of “social prescribing” – referring patients to non-clinical activities in a bid to improve their physical or mental health'.
To find out more about the materials and case studies developed by Growing Health you can visit the website, download their toolkit or join the mailing list.
Published Thursday 16 May 2019
Growing Health: Growing Health is a national project run by Garden Organic and Sustain, which is funded by the Tudor Trust, to see how community food growing can be routinely used by the health and social care services as a way of promoting health and wellbeing for a range of individuals and population groups.
