Focused Recovery From Eating & Emotional Difficulties
If you’re struggling with an eating disorder or your mental health, you deserve care that listens, understands, and meets you where you are. We’re here to offer free, person-centred counselling for people aged 16 and over, providing compassionate, neuro-inclusive, and trauma-informed support at every stage of your recovery.
If you feel ready to reach out, you can start your self-referral by clicking the get help button.
Our History:
Rooted in Worksop, Built for Our Community
Our work began in Worksop in 1996, when specialist eating disorder support simply didn’t exist locally. With just £200 and a determination to make sure no one felt alone, a former sufferer brought together a small self-help group for anyone affected — individuals, carers, families, and friends.
The group chose the name FREED after a member described her illness as “a locked cage” — and recovery as finding the key. That image shaped everything that followed.
As the need for early, specialist support grew, the group became a registered charity and developed a service based on what local people said they needed most: timely intervention, counselling, family support, and education for GPs and schools. This project became FREED Beeches — Bringing Education, Empowerment, Counselling and Holistic Eating Disorder Support — and in 2003 it opened its doors as the region’s first dedicated eating disorder service.
Your Future:
Growing Forward, Shaped Around Your Needs
In 2025, FREED Beeches became simply FREED — a modern, person-centred charity shaped around what people in Worksop and the surrounding area told us they needed next. Today, we offer free, evidence-based psychological support not only for eating disorders, but for a wider range of mental health challenges too.
Our name may have evolved, but our purpose hasn’t.
We’re still rooted in Worksop, grounded in lived experience, and here to make sure you never have to face your recovery journey alone.
Our Mission
Our mission grows directly from where we began: a small room in Worksop, a handful of people determined that no one should face an eating disorder alone, and the belief that recovery becomes possible when the right support arrives at the right time.
That belief still guides us.
Today, FREED offers free, person-centred psychological support for eating disorders and wider mental health challenges, shaped by lived experience and grounded in evidence. We know recovery isn’t linear and no two journeys look the same — so we listen first, adapt with care, and walk alongside each person at their own pace.
What started as a grassroots self-help group has become a modern service rooted in compassion, inclusion, and the simple conviction that everyone deserves to feel understood, respected, and supported in finding their way forward.
Our mission is, and always has been, to make sure the people of Worksop and the surrounding area don’t just access treatment — they feel genuinely held, heard, and empowered on their path to recovery.