Young people in Renfrewshire are seeking to change people’s attitudes towards mental health problems by making them realise the true extent of the emotional impact it can have and to tackle the stigma around speaking out.
They have helped put together some unapologetically hard-hitting videos to show those who might not understand or perhaps even ridicule the effects of mental health problems.
The initiative was organised by Linwood-based Youth Interventions, a collective of youth workers, recovery practitioners and psychotherapists who specialise in the mental wellbeing of young people aged 11-25, and their families.
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The project was possible thanks to £5,000 of funding from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s Healthy Minds Network.
In all, 17 youngsters from Youth Interventions sat down with Sean Lìonadh to give their views on how best to convey the emotional turmoil mental health problems create.
Three videos were created, focusing on themes of anxiety, self-harm, and addiction respectively.
One video cleverly makes the viewer believe the protagonist is visiting a friend in a cafe and what starts out as seemingly small questions of self-doubt, balloon rapidly into an explosion of anxiety, and the viewer realises there is no friend in the scene, just the protagonist’s psyche.
Another explores the reasons why people might be drawn to self-harm and rubbishes the stigma that says people who do so are attention seekers.
The final video deals with the after-effects of a heavy night’s drinking. The young protagonist awakes to find his “gaff’s in state” and regret begins to dawn on him for what he did the night before. Unable to deal with the emotions that are hitting him he is led to opt for more booze instead of tackling the issues that are bothering him, repeating the cycle yet again.
The content was inspired by the stories of those young people at Youth Interventions.
Director of Youth Interventions Louise Dempsey explained: “We sat down with Sean and said look we’ve got these therapeutic vignettes, why don’t you take these and come out and meet our young people and let's talk out and see what happens in the room.
“So they did free writing and poetry and from that process ideas started to formulate.”
Louise told us that they didn’t want to evoke sympathy from the viewer, they wanted to create an uncomfortable viewing experience, to simulate the real-life emotion as much as is possible and to make people realise the extent of the problems facing many people.
“Me and the team sat down and discussed the psychology behind it and we did not want to evoke sympathy.” She said.
“We wanted it to be uncomfortable, and we wanted to give the viewer an insight into the torture of what it can be like inside the mind.
“We didn’t want the response to be like ‘oh that’s a shame’ because research shows that if you really want to make a change, if you can evoke an emotional response to a stimuli memories are created. So we wanted it to be a piece whereby people watch it and go ‘ooft ok’.
The videos can be viewed on the Youth Interventions website here: shorturl.at/bH034
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