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. #workshop #mentalhealth #depression #China

CandleX has been hoping to establish a mental health support group ever since the beginning of our project. We want to provide a space where people who are going through a difficult time can meet to offer and receive support. It isn’t easy to set up this kind of group. We don’t have a sufficient budget for such activities and it is a constant struggle to pay for the required media publicity to enable those in need to find out about our group. We need a private space in a good location that can provide a comfortable and soothing setting – we also need this space to be freely available for us to use. We were also worried as to whether or not the people who sign up to attend would actually come – and if they did would they be comfortable enough to share their deepest feeling in order to receive support or would they feel as though they had to keep their thoughts hidden? We were also worried that that the attendees would not get on with each other. Friends of CandleX kept on prompting us to start this group and helped us to spread the word that we were looking for a space. We were generously offered the ideal space to use at no cost and so we decided to be brave, and mustered up the courage to face our fears, and held our first peer support group on 27th October 2017. People came without knowing what to expect and we are so grateful to these attendees for taking the chance to meet with us. Attendees reported after that they felt warm and supported and would like to continue to meet in the future. And so it was that our fears of organizing this group were proven wrong and thankfully relieved. This session officially marked the beginning of a English language peer support group in our own Beijing community. We will meet once every 2 weeks. Please email info@candlex.cn to reserve a spot. The power of connection and compassion heals. Do not suffer alone when you can heal in a group! #mentalhealth #supportgroup #Beijing #depression

On 23rd August 2015, the awesome BJfoodies community warmly hosted CandleX for their August dinner gathering. Xiaojie Qin introduced CandleX to the dinner group and presented the upcoming events all aimed at increasing the metal well being of the Beijing community. We’d like to express our appreciation to Kristen from BJFoodies for making this happen. Thank you too our CandleX friends and supporters from Moishe House for joining us for dinner. We really appreciate the community support and your support will keep this project running. #Beijingfoodies #China #mentalhealth