On April 26th, 2016 CandleX held a workshop on depression for the British Council staff. The workshop was conducted by Melena, a certified counsellor, and Xiaojie, CandleX founder.
The presentation included a 60 minute multi-media and interactive workshop followed by a Q&A session. The goal of the workshop was to inform people about depression, and to promote self care and care for colleagues, friends and family members who may be experiencing depression.
We covered key components of depression symptoms, the prevalence of depression, and also spoke about how to help both ourselves and others.
Depression is a serious issue, but we don’t have to treat talking about it as if it is something shameful and hopeless. CandleX’s workshops all take an easy to digest approach and make use of role-play, multi-media, group work and self-reflection exercises. Afterwards, we were very happy to receive positive feedback from the staff and to learn that the posters we handed out to them were already stuck up on their office walls.
350 million people in the world suffer from depression. This means you probably know someone who is currently suffering or has suffered in the past. You may not know who this person is. It could be your friend, colleague, or even a family member. We want to tell those that have depression that there is help in Beijing and to inform those who don’t have depression, how they can help.
If you think your work place or school could benefit from a workshop such as this one, email us at info@candlex.org .
When we start to talk about depression we start to heal.
