A man claims he has cured his depression by taking daily dips - in freezing water.<br /><br />Mitchell Bock, 30, was suffering from severe depression, anxiety and feelings of dread for years, which lead him attempting suicide last year.<br /><br />He was hospitalised by a crisis team and discharged after 13 hours with a single follow-up call, which he described as a "tick-box exercise".<br /><br />After he was discharged, Mitchell felt disappointed by the care he received and unmotivated for several weeks. <br /><br />This pushed him to look into alternative treatments for his ailments.<br /><br />He said: "It wasn't that I was feeling completely empty. After the hospital, I was feeling hopeless.<br /><br />"It was kind of a where do I go from here sort of thing. When I went to hospital, I thought at least I would get help."<br /><br />In January, just weeks after his suicide attempt, Mitchell's mother Melanie Aldridge, 50, sent him an ice bath, a tub designed to retain cold that he could use to submerge himself.<br /><br />They had both begun to look into the benefits of ice-water therapy, so Mitchell started using it right away.<br /><br />Within a few days, Mitchell said he began to feel the effects.<br /><br />"When I first did it, I remember waking up without the usual feeling of dread," Mitchell, a finance worker, said.<br /><br />"It was like going to bed with the flu and waking up completely cured.<br /><br />"I don't find it uncomfortable anymore. At first your body panics. You feel tingling and your heart races, but once you control your breathing its fine.<br /><br />"I see it as swapping out a whole day of discomfort for a few minutes. You come out feeling amazing. It really is an instant thing."<br /><br />Now, Mitchell, from Caerphilly, Wales, tries to have an ice bath, a cold shower - or go wild swimming in freezing water - every day.<br /><br />He added: "I try to do it every day. I take an ice bath. If not, a cold shower, and the only time I don't do that, I swim in cold water.<br /><br />"The coldest I've done was an ice bath at zero degrees, surrounded by snow."<br /><br />Mitchell's ice baths have been so effective he has started to wean himself off the medication he has been taking for years.<br /><br />He has stopped taking his anti-anxiety medication entirely - as well as his regular therapy sessions. <br /><br />Mitchell is also slowly weaning himself off antidepressant.<br /><br />He said: I've been on meds and going to therapy for years. Whenever I've rung the doctors, it's been a short conversation and they've told me to up my meds.<br /><br />"I've started weaning myself off one of my medications and stopped taking one altogether. I'm that confident in how I'm feeling."
