About Us

The Beginning

How We Got Started
On Social Media

The Depression Project originally started as a Facebook page by Australian brothers Danny & Mathew Baker - Danny having suffered from depression from 2008-2012, and Mathew being a professional counsellor. Both with a passion for depression and mental health, they began posting on Facebook in order to:

• Help people with depression better understand what they're going through, and feel less isolated, alone and misunderstood;
• Help people who've never experienced depression before to better understand the illness, and know how to support their loved ones through it.

Towards the end of 2019, over 1,000,000 people were following The Depression Project's Facebook page, and sharing and sharing our posts to help create a mentally healthier world. The Depression Project then started an Instagram page to keep the momentum going, and by 2022, it had over 2,000,000 followers, and our social media posts had been viewed over 10 billion times.

Books & Journals

In the course of running The Depression Project's Facebook and Instagram pages, Danny & Mathew had the opportunity to interact with countless people with depression, and read countless comments that The Depression Project's community members had left about the obstacles that people with depression face in order to get better. Most commonly, these included:

• “Therapy and counselling being too expensive."
• “Having to wait weeks and weeks to see a therapist - and then not even finding the session(s) very helpful.”
• "Lack of motivation."
• "Lack of support and understanding from family and friends."

Consequently, The Depression Project started teaming up with a range of different therapists and industry professionals in order to create affordable, accessible resources to help remove these obstacles. At the moment, these include:

• Our book This Is How You Overcome Depression - which will give you the clear, detailed, step-by-step treatment plan you need so that by the time you’ve finished reading it, you’ll know exactly what you need to do to overcome depression – in such a way that it doesn't come back.
• Negative Thoughts Journals - which help people with depression overcome the most common negative thoughts that our community members report experiencing, such as "I'm a failure", "I'm a burden", "I'm useless", "I'm never going to overcome depression", "everybody hates me", "I can't do anything right" and "I shouldn't be depressed because I've got a good life", for example.
• Depression Journals - each of these journals help people with depression cope with and overcome extremely common - yet minimally talked about - aspects of depression, such as "depression lack-of-motivation", "depression numbness", "depression overwhelm", "night time depression", and "existential depression", for example.
• Worrying Thoughts Journals - we're creating these to help people with depression (and anxiety and other mental health issues) overcome the most common worrying thoughts that our community members report experiencing - such as "have I done something wrong?" and "what if my mental illness only keeps getting worse?"

All of The Depression Project's books and journals are based on leading, evidence-based principles from cognitive behavioural therapy - including specialised forms of cognitive behavioural therapy such as dialectical behaviour therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and/or exposure therapy. And, in this way, they help people who don't have access to therapy learn many of the techniques, tools and strategies that they would learn in therapy.

Additionally, to improve accessibility to professional resources, our books and journals are also intentionally made very affordable; and they can be accessed from anywhere, at any time. Furthermore, since so many people in our community have expressed their disappointment at paying for therapy, not finding it helpful, and then consequently feeling as if they've "lost" a considerable sum of money, everything The Depression Project offers comes with a moneyback guarantee - to ensure that our members don't ever pay for anything which they don't find helpful.

Community Values

As we hope you can see, The Depression Project is deeply community-driven. We listen extremely closely to the problems that people in our community tell us they're facing - day after day after day after day - in order to understand the difficult, painful, complicated plight of people with depression as well as we possibly can. And, as we do so, we create resources to help solve these problems.

It's for this reason that at The Depression Project, our slogan is: creating a mentally healthy world, together.