Mental Health

Mental Health Project

Intended Target Audience

The intended target audience are students from Key Stage 3, 4 and 5. We will be using people of a similar ages with stories that apply to the exact age range we are aiming for.

Stem4

Stem4 is a teenage mental health charity aimed at improving teenage mental health by stemming commonly occurring mental health issues at an early stage.

Their mission statement is as follows:

“Young people have just as much right to accessing facts about good mental health as they do good physical health, and yet there is a lack of accurate information. Embarrassment or social stigma surrounding mental health issues can so easily lead to confusion with what may be normal development, as opposed to the early development of a mental health issue.

By sharing information on how to recognise early warning signs and by providing effective strategies in how to deal with them, we aim to stem these conditions early on.

Emphasis on the early identification of mental health conditions is backed by recent Government initiatives and is recommended by The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK.”

What is depression?

Depression are serious problems for teenagers. Common features of depression include hopelessness, sadness, irritability and anger, isolation, withdrawal and worthlessness.

Young people do not often express their depression in a straightforward way and can show they are affected through passive or negative behaviours.

Most people, including children and adults feel low occasionally. This is a normal reaction to events that are stressful or upsetting. It is even more common for teenagers to be affected by a range of moods, particularly feeling ‘blue’.

However, sometimes these feelings continue and become an illness, which will then start to affect your teenager negatively. This illness is depression. Depression can affect children as young as eleven although it is less common in the younger age group. Clinical depression, requiring appropriate treatment is thought to affect around every 5 out of 100 teenagers (Source: Stem4.org.uk)

Mental Health Campaigns

Time to Change 60 Second Ad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdPZ7rw0wMc

This advert made its way around TV and social media in 2011 and for a few years thereafter. It features an office worker curious as to how his co-worker Dave is feeling after his return to work after suffering with “some sort of mental health problem”. The office worker is reluctant to ask Dave how he is feeling as he’s worried the mental health issues have caused him to go a little bit crazy. The worker runs through a series of 3 scenarios in his head in which he asks Dave how is feeling, the first scenario has Dave replying to question by taking off his shoe, using it as a telephone and screaming “Hi yeah, got some idiot here whose just asked me how I’m feeling!”

The second scenario sees Dave collapse into a pile of dust or salt, completely avoiding an interaction with the office worker, the third scenario has Dave make up an excuse to avoid answering the question, he claims he’s “late home for dinner” and that he “needs to get home” before proceeding to head towards the photocopier and climbing inside the base compartment before shutting the door.

After all of these scenarios have played out in the workers head, he is returned to reality. Dave is stood next to him, seemingly pondering the worker’s question “how are you feeling?” Dave then replies “Pretty good thanks yeah, good days and bad days but yeah I’m glad to be back at work…cheers for asking.” to which the worker replies “no worries.” Dave then returns the question and the two converse for a short while whilst the tag line for the mental health campaign appears across the screen.

The adverts target audience is anyone who is unsure of how to approach a person suffering from mental health issues, it aims to teach the viewers that talking about mental health isn’t taboo, in fact it’s encouraged to talk openly about it.

This is a successful advert due to its appeal to a wide audience. It’s ridiculously over the top approach towards such a sensitive subject evokes a receptive response from its target audience. The reality is most of us have been in a situation where we fear asking personal questions due to the possible responses we could receive. Curiosity isn’t necessarily rude, it’s good to spread awareness amongst work colleagues, friends, family etc. Letting someone know you’re in their thoughts is never a bad thing, and we aim to relay this message throughout our own campaign.

Time to Change TV Ad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2DQt361hI8

This advert is a much harder hitting piece of advertising that attacks the stereotypes of mental illness, the advert puts you in the shoes of someone suffering with a mental illness and aims to make the audience uncomfortable with it’s hard to digest dialogue.

The target audience for this advert is anyone in the vicinity of someone suffering with mental health. The uncomfortable dialogue is sure to make anyone watching take a look at themselves and think “Am I understanding?”

The deep meaning of this advert is something we hope to replicate in our campaign, we want our audience to recognise the issues that surround stereotypes and misconceptions related to depression.

Our Plan

We want our campaign to stand out for many different reasons. We want the imagery to speak for itself, we want our message of acceptance and understanding to resonate with our audience long after they have witnessed the campaign and we want our film to strike out against the taboo nature surrounding conversations about depression.

People with mental health problems say that the social stigma attached to mental ill health and the discrimination they experience can make their difficulties worse and make it harder to recover.

Mental illness is common. It affects thousands of people in the UK, and their friends, families, work colleagues and society in general.

• One in four people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their lives.
• Around one in ten children experience mental health problems.
• Depression affects around one in 12 of the whole population.
• Rates of self-harm in the UK are the highest in Europe at 400 per 100,000.
• 450 million people world-wide have a mental health problem.

Most people who experience mental health problems recover fully, or are able to live with and manage them, especially if they get help early on. But even though so many people are affected, there is a strong social stigma attached to mental ill health, and people with mental health problems can experience discrimination in all aspects of their lives.

Many people's problems are made worse by the stigma and discrimination they experience -€“ from society, but also from families, friends and employers.

Nearly nine out of ten people with mental health problems say that stigma and discrimination have a negative effect on their lives.

We know that people with mental health problems are amongst the least likely of any group with a long-term health condition or disability to:

• Find work
• Be in a steady, long-term relationship
• Live in decent housing
• Be socially included in mainstream society.

This is because society in general has stereotyped views about mental illness and how it affects people. Many people believe that people with mental ill health are violent and dangerous, when in fact they are more at risk of being attacked or harming themselves than harming other people.

Stigma and discrimination can also worsen someone’s mental health problems, and delay or impede their getting help and treatment, and their recovery. Social isolation, poor housing, unemployment and poverty are all linked to mental ill health. So stigma and discrimination can trap people in a cycle of illness. The situation is exacerbated by the media. Media reports often link mental illness with violence, or portray people with mental health problems as dangerous, criminal, evil, or very disabled and unable to live normal, fulfilled lives.

This is far from the case.

Research shows that the best way to challenge these stereotypes is through first-hand contact with people with experience of mental health problems. A number of national and local campaigns are trying to change public attitudes to mental illness. These include the national voluntary sector campaign Time to Change.

The Equality Act 2010 makes it illegal to discriminate directly or indirectly against people with mental health problems in public services and functions, access to premises, work, education, associations and transport.

We want to hammer home that discrimination is not OK and that simply communicating is the key to a lot of issues surrounding metal health. We hope to make a change by using real people to tell real stories, in a manner that is both respectful and progressive.

Being sensitive towards mental health and suicide

Knowing that we were to tackle mental  health and the issues surrounding depression such as suicide etc. I decided to get into contact with representatives in connection with mental health organisations. I was lucky enough to receive a short but insightful phone call from Stem4, a mental health organisation located within London. I was given a few guidelines for tackling such a delicate nature such as suicide, especially on a platform where it could be potentially viewed by a lot of people.  

Don’t talk about the contents of the suicide note, if there is one.

Don't describe the suicide method.

Report on suicide as a public health issue.

Don’t speculate why the person might have done it.

Don’t quote or interview police or first responders about the causes of suicide.

Describe suicide as “died by suicide” or “completed” or “killed him/herself,” rather than “committed suicide.”

Don’t glamorize suicide.

(Funnily enough 13 Reasons Why effectively violates every single one of those guidelines)

We should also make sure we present enough information that allows the viewers of our campaign to get in touch with organisations that can help them, whether they wish to learn more about the effects of mental health, they know someone suffering the negative effects of mental health or if it is indeed themselves that suffer and are in need of external help that they simply cannot receive from family and friends.