SPZ Ratingen

Founded in 2012, SPZ Ratingen is a charity based in Ratingen, Germany working on mental health, addiction, community development.

SPZ Ratingen is a non-profit community psychiatric centre in Ratingen, Germany, run by the Sozialpsychiatrisches Zentrum Ratingen gemeinnützige GmbH. It provides counselling, accompaniment and support to adults with mental illness or addiction problems and to their relatives, including a low-threshold contact and counselling centre, ambulant supported living, group offers, daytime structuring, and crisis and psychosocial support. Services are free of charge and offered without prior registration in many cases. The organisation is jointly owned by the Sozialdienst katholischer Frauen e.V. Ratingen and the Diakonie im Kirchenkreis Düsseldorf-Mettmann gGmbH, and is recognised as a community psychiatric service by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland and the Kreis Mettmann. It is funded partly through contracts with public bodies and partly through donations, and it runs the wirsindviele campaign to reduce stigma around mental illness. It also involves service users through a user council and trains young professionals.