Hopezine

Hopezine is a small, printed independent magazine and blog and now book - right here! - by me, Erica Crompton, a journalist with schizoaffective who survived a suicide attempt.

Launched in November 2018 at an NHS suicide prevention conference at the Bet365 stadium, Hopezine aims to share stories from people who have survived adversity in all its forms to offer hope for all people with mental illnesses or disabilities.

Since we started we've received press coverage for our work in The Daily Mail, Happiful Magazine, Scotland's Daily Record, and the Lancet Psychiatry. We've worked with academics to promote citizen science and student photographers at Stafford College to promote hope for young people.

As a mental health campaigner and journalist (NYTimes, Guardian, Metro, Lancet, etc) based in Staffordshire and the creator behind Hopezine - it's something I wished to do after two friends from my childhood were lost to suicide in summer 2018. With these two deaths in mind, and having survived a suicide attempt myself in 2009, I wanted to do something to reach out to others in the UK and offer hope.

Since 2018, we've grown from a team of one to a team of two with a wide variety of expert and lived experience contributors. In September 2021, wheelchair-user Paul Nicholls got onboard as Accessibility Consultant, and we launched an accessible travel element to Hopezine on a trip to Belfast marked with a special print edition dedicated to the city seen in a wheelchair.

Today we continue to run our print publication with support from sponsors SimplyBiz and have grown our readership from 750 to 7K UVs quarterly.

I hope you enjoy looking at our diverse archive of uplifting stories here.