To describe the members of Hackney FC as football-mad would be a provocation rather than a cliche. Eight players in the squad suffer from schizophrenia, three from bipolar disorder and two from psychosis. Several have depression. Two have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, to prevent them doing harm to themselves or to others. All of them have found, to a greater or lesser degree, sanity and salvation on a football pitch.

Many players began their sporting odyssey in the bleak, beige communal area of the mental health centre at Homerton Hospital in East London. At the end of one corridor, through several locked doors, resides Janette Hynes, a senior occupational therapist specialising in rehabilitation, and a qualified football coach.

In 2002 Janette decided that her patients would benefit socially from playing football. Five years on, that decision has flowered into the Positive Mental Attitude League, which boasts 14 teams from six mental health trusts around London, and is affiliated to the Football Association. Her players, who train for two hours once a week and most of whom now live in the community, have lowered their risk of relapse.

Her determination to show that sport can improve mental health has earned her a place in the finals tomorrow of the Medical Future Innovation Awards, a competition that brings new ideas in the medical profession to a wider, business-savvy audience. The USP of these football teams is that they provide a halfway house between hospital and community.

“If people are too afraid to get on the bus to come to training, or are being distracted by voices in their heads, I know about it straight away,” says Janette, 41, a former professional for Fulham FC. Catching problems early, she says, means that the football-play-ing patients are less likely to relapse than other patients.

By asking players to fill out pre- and post-season questionnaires, Janette, together with the healthcare charity King’s Fund, has been able to show that her team enjoy other measurable health benefits. Three quarters of those playing with Hackney FC for a season were able to cut down their medication, reported a better social and family life, and found a job or a college course. They also cut down on tobacco and illicit drugs, took up more exercise, lost weight and ate more healthily.

Janette knows that her players benefit psychologically from socialising with other sufferers of severe mental illness. “Socialising comes before everything else because that is the key to getting them back into the community – they need to make friends and get out of the house. One lad who’s now going to college would have been walking around in circles on the ward. The players like the team because it’s regular, they see their friends, and it’s given them a role in life.”

The scheme has been so successful that Janette’s trust has given her a full-time position to develop the Positive Mental Attitude League further.

On Thursday of last week, while the final matches in the PMA League were being played on an AstroTurf pitch in the shadow of Leyton Orient’s ground, I collared Albert, a versatile 42-year-old player who has suffered half his life with paranoid schizophrenia. What does he get out of the team? He tells me that he needs to think carefully before saying anything, because the voices in his head sometimes tell him to say or do things that are inappropriate. “They [the team] are like brothers to me,” he says finally.

Albert dates his descent into mental illness back to 1985, when, as a 21-year-old clerical officer, he fell in love with a woman of whom his late father disapproved. The struggle between love and duty “led to me losing control of my mind. I got confused, stopped bothering about my personal hygiene, kept vomiting and losing weight. I thought the world was against me. I thought I was going to die.

“I got voices in my head and they were telling me to do bad things, like stand naked or to think bad things about my family.” In 1990 he was sectioned; over the following 11 years he was treated in hospital six times. He joined Janette’s team three years ago. “The team has given me confidence, self-belief, happiness and motivation,” Albert says. “It’s helped me to move away from paranoia, to move forward, and it’s kept me fit. ”

He now lives independently, on benefits, in a flat. Albert says he will be on medication for life and that he still gets “thoughts”, especially at night. But he still harbours poignantly humdrum ambitions: “To get married to a nice Goan girl, to have two or three babies, to get a job or a qualification.”

Some of Albert’s teammates could easily pass as professionals. One is Michael Smellie, a tall, lean, handsome 23-year-old who – although it probably breaches club etiquette to say so – is the star of the team. In a recent European tournament of mental health teams, Hackney FC’s striker was named player of the tournament.

Several years ago, Michael quit his job as a bus conductor because he was stressed, and took to smoking weed.

“My mum noticed my mood changes, and that I was talking about things that weren’t there. I thought everyone was gossiping about me, that I was the talk of the street. I stopped talking, stopped going out, stopped socialising and stayed in the house 24/7.” Two years ago psychosis and depression was diagnosed, for which he is on medication.

Michael’s 44-year-old mother Anita, who has come to cheer her son on, says that joining the team “has brought Michael out of himself. There’s the physical side but also the social side, and meeting people in the same predicament as him. He thought he was the only one.” Michael would now like to get himself a job and a girlfriend.

It took more than two years of badgering the FA, and football clubs, for Janette to get the PMA League going, partly because mental illness hadn’t really cropped up as an issue in sport before. Clubs told her that while they had money to do activities with people with learning disabilities, no such pot existed for mental ill-health. She would like to see it classified as a disability in sport. The FA has made some strides by appointing the former England captain Tony Adams, who has spoken frankly of his battle against various addictions, as an ambassador for mental health.

Thanks to Janette’s lobbying, Charlton Athletic is now considering appointing its own mental health representative. “There’s such a stigma, and yet it can happen to anybody,” she says. “Our captain recently said to me that when he saw the team walking out on the pitch, they didn’t look like mental patients. That’s what we’re about – breaking down barriers.”

For people like Albert, who thought that severe mental illness would be the death of him, Hackney FC is really about survival: “Now that I’ve got my mind back,” he says, “it’s so nice to be alive.”

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