A man who battled depression and alcohol abuse for years before attempting suicide has credited outdoor swimming for changing his life.<\/p>\n
Richard Williams, from Worcestershire, joined a research project looking at the impact of the activity on depression and anxiety after a chance encounter with an old friend.<\/p>\n
The 42-year-old is now sober and recently married, and uses cold water to manage his stress.<\/p>\n
Mr Williams was depressed for years before realising he had mental health problems and started drinking heavily in 2018.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In March 2022, Mr Williams tried to take his own life. He said: \u201cI got to the point where I was like, this is it, I\u2019m no good.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to end it all. I had a couple of attempts to end it all. Fortunately, they weren\u2019t successful.\u201d<\/p>\n
After surviving the attempt, Mr Williams started working on himself and tried exercise, medication and therapy as part of his recovery.<\/p>\n
However, a talk with an old friend that led him to joining the Outside (OUTdoor Swimming as a nature-based Intervention for DEpression) research project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man who battled depression and alcohol abuse for years before attempting suicide has credited outdoor swimming for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[97,259,260,3,21953],"class_list":{"0":"post-311378","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}