Appeal: Your £30,000 will bring help to the desperate

Some of Britain's most desperate and isolated people will be offered a lifeline this year thanks to readers of The Independent on Sunday.

Our Christmas appeal on behalf of SANELINE, the mental health helpline, has raised more than £30,000, to go directly towards helping those who suffer as a result of mental illness.

Marjorie Wallace MBE, the chief executive of SANELINE, described herself as "thrilled" with our campaign, which has attracted impressive celebrity backing.

"We've been enormously encouraged by the spontaneous response to this campaign from celebrities and readers alike," said Ms Wallace. "This money will enable us to pay for 100 phone calls to people in crisis or distress every week for the next year."

A number of prominent figures have backed our campaign, including Joanna Lumley, Boy George, Jonathan Miller, Ned Sherrin, Juliet Stevenson and Jane Asher.

Ms Wallace spoke of her hope that the success of the appeal had gone some way towards fighting the stigma surrounding mental illness.

"People are beginning to realise that those with mental illness are individuals who – given the time and focus they need – can be saved," she said.

SANELINE receives over 1,000 calls a week, largely from carers, mental health workers and those suffering with mental illness, but relies heavily on donations for its funding. The helpline costs around £1m a year to run, with 90 per cent coming from voluntary sources and individuals.

Ms Wallace said that the money from our campaign would prove a significant help with SANELINE's work, including its unique "caller care" service – returning calls from those in distress the following day in order to check on their condition.

"We hope that with the encouragement of the IoS appeal we will be able to continue developing a team of professional people who will be trained to ring callers back," she said. "That way, a call to SANELINE does not have to stop at the end of the first conversation."

Although our appeal is now drawing to an end, the work of SANELINE, and its parent charity SANE, is set to continue unabated in 2003.

Twelve years of planning and campaigning will come to fruition in February, when the Prince of Wales International Centre for SANE Research is formally opened in Oxford. The centrewill be one of the few places in the world dedicated solely to searching for the causes of schizophrenia and depression.

The charity will continue in its research, campaigning and political lobbying during the new year. "We'll be working closely with government ministers redrafting the Mental Health Bill to reflect a better balance of rights, fighting so that care in the community will no longer mean neglect, and working towards a situation where families and carers will at last have their rights and needs recognised," Ms Wallace said. "We will continue to campaign so that people with mental illness will receive better, newer medications and places of refuge or asylum when they need them."