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I'm leaving the UK on the 20th July to walk El Camino de Santiago de Compostela - The Santiago Way - a blistering 825km ancient pilgrimage across Northern Spain to raise funds for Rethink Mental Illness, a charity who do incredibly important work campaigning to destigmatise mental health disorders and to improve the lives of people affected by mental illness.

I'm walking in memory of my mother Jenny, this year being the 10th anniversary of her death; Mum was someone who had a huge capacity for enjoying life and contributed enormously to the happiness and well-being of others, but who also suffered increasingly debilitating episodes of clinical depression throughout her lifetime, severe enough to be hospitalised on a number of occasions. Yet she never received a conclusive diagnosis or effective long-term treatment. In fact, one of her doctors once described her as a 'medical enigma'. Not terribly helpful.

Given the major advances in recent years that there have been into the better understanding and treatment of various types of depressive disorder, it's highly likely that had she had the benefit of the vastly improved diagnostic approaches and treatments in use today, the quality of her life would have been enhanced immeasurably.

But quite apart from developing effective treatments, there is a huge amount of work that still needs to be done in changing attitudes and misconceptions around depressive illnesses and the stigma that surrounds them. Given that 1 in 4 people is currently estimated to suffer from some form of depression during their lifetime, it seems pretty likely that anyone reading this will know someone who has experienced an episode of depression, or have had one themselves.

Yet we still can't seem to get over the idea that depression is in some way 'shameful' or something to be embarrassed about; just a couple of quite shocking statistics from a 2009 survey conducted by Time To Change illustrate the scale of the problem: 92% of the British public said they believed that admitting to having a mental illness of some kind would damage someone's career, and 56% of potential employers said they would not employ someone who had a record of mental illness, even if they were the best candidate.

And although things do seem to be gradually improving - with more and more high profile figures talking about their own mental health problems - until the misconceptions around mental illness are changed in a really meaningful way, people will continue to suffer unnecessarily rather than seeking out the treatment and support that is readily available to them.

Which is the reason I have chosen to raise funds for Rethink Mental Illness: to contribute as much as possible both to the high profile campaign work they do to end discrimination around mental health and to the nationwide services they provide that actively support people suffering from a range of mental health disorders, including depression.

Needless to say, any contributions to Rethink Mentall Illness would be hugely appreciated. For anyone who has suffered from a serious bout of depression, I hope the importance of the work that Rethink is doing speaks for itself. And for anyone who reads this and feels no direct connection to the charity, I would still urge you make any contribution you can; even if you've only ever experienced a mild case of the Monday morning blues, you'll have at least some inkling of how incapacitating a full blown depressive illness might be, and consider how much worse, or indeed better, things could be.

I'm writing a blog about my experiences along The Way which you can find at www.timeforarethink.net and which I hope will be an amusing read for anyone who's interested - if nothing else because it will no doubt be an official record of how completely useless I am at Navigation of any kind!

As they say, Buen Camino...