Making a Difference

Achieving a Healthy and Caring Community

Choose Life - A Life-Changing Experience

It is a little-known fact that suicide rates in Moray, particularly amongst the male population, are considerably higher than the national average.

Choose Life is a ten-year Scottish Executive funded initiative aimed at reducing the rate of suicide in Scotland by 20% by 2013.  Here in Moray a number of successful projects and training courses have taken place.  One of these is the Elgin Desktop Publishing Project, which offers people with mental health problems a route back into mainstream work and hopefully a feeling of social inclusion.

Through being involved with this project, Mike's life has been transformed in the last six months from a nervous recluse to a sociable, entertaining, intelligent and much-loved member of the Moray Resource Centre.  Mike had accumulated drawings and cartoons over the years, which he has now been able to compile into a book using skills, which he believed he had lost through his illness.

From the original stated aim of "getting the book done... and that's it.", Mike has subsequently moved on to tackle further desktop publishing projects.  These have reignited both a joy in doing something productive for himself and a sense of social usefulness in doing something for others.  Mike is currently preparing to put on a one-man show of his work this winter in the Resource Centre.

"Coming here has been a life-changing event.  It has picked me up from despair and given me a totally different outlook on life"                                        Mike