A MENTAL health charity is due to open a new respite house in Old Town to provide a place for people suffering from stress or depression to take a break.

Swindon Mind will be closing the doors of its old site at Oak Lodge at the end of the month, and is shutting down for three weeks while its new accommodation is organised.

The new five-bedroom home will allow people in distress to stay for up to two weeks to have a change from their daily routines.

Stephanie Holt, manager of Oak Lodge, said: “We are calling it a respite house because we are bringing it into the heart of the community.

“It will be for people who are experiencing some kind of emotional crisis, but are not really ill enough to warrant being taken into a hospital ward.

“We will be trying to help people with stress or depression, and giving families a break from it all.”

The former hospital building site at Oak Lodge will now provide more permanent respite accommodation as the Windswept Rehab Unit.

“Our last guests will be leaving Oak Lodge on Friday, August 23, and the new house will be opening on September 16,” Stephanie added.

“Because it will take about three weeks to sort out, we will be stopping operations for that time while we get up and running.

“We had to move because Avon and Wiltshire Partnership just needed to claim back the Oak Lodge site.

“They gave us plenty of notice and have helped with the removal costs, so they have been great.

“We were quite sad when we knew we had to leave, but now we are very excited that we have the keys to this new place.”

Paula Wyatt, lead worker with Swindon Mind, said: “We have come from a hospital site and are now coming into an ordinary house, so it is a bit of a change, but hopefully for the better.

“The new house will be a real sanctuary as it has a lovely garden and is just around the corner from the Town Gardens, so we hope people will be very comfortable here and will be able to treat it as their own home.”

In April Swindon Mind launched its Paperclip Challenge, which encouraged people to trade items for paperclips to raise funds for the new house. While they have managed to secure the building, they are unsure at to how effective the campaign has been.

Paul said: “We were hoping to get our own house out of the Paperclip Challenge, because we saw how well the idea had worked in America.

“But I’m not sure if people here were as enthusiastic about the whole thing.”