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An art campaign on campus is attacking the stigma around mental health.
Just One Thing is the creation of third-year neuroscience student Rebecca Hay. She manages the campaign through a Facebook page and posters placed around campus.
The posters feature young people in pencil and watercolour drawings. The portraits are meant to look like mug shots and are done only in black and white to represent the vulnerability that people with mental illnesses might feel, Hay said.
When choosing an idea for the campaign, which evolved out of a neuroscience class project, Hay immediately thought of her own personal experience with mental health stigma, she said.
“I have some loved ones who suffer from mental illness. And by not saying anything and being silent about it, I’m becoming part of the problem,” she said. “It’s paralyzing. The label of being someone with a specific disorder is much worse than just shouldering through. That’s the view in our society.”
After deciding to focus on the stigma around mental health, Hay then decided art would be the best medium to get her message across.
“I feel like art is the best way to communicate something to someone because it’s so subjective and at the same time there’s almost no miscommunication,” she said. “You can express so much.”
Accompanying the posters’ art is text including statistics, facts and other information surrounding particular mental illnesses, such as eating disorders and drug addictions. Hay said including more information was the most important part of her campaign.
“I want people to be able to relate to the art and then maybe read into the posters for a bit more information,” she said. “Part of the reason why stigma is so horrible right now is because people don’t fully understand the issues, and they don’t understand that (mental illness) isn’t something you can just get over.”
On her eating disorder poster, Hay writes that eating disorders can be caused by serotonin dysregulation in the brain. She said that if people hear the neuroscience background behind mental illnesses, they may change their perceptions surrounding mental health as a whole.
Hay hopes Just One Thing will encourage more people to speak up about their own mental health or reach out to others who have mental illnesses, she said.
“Even if just a few people see my posters and the Facebook campaign, maybe they’ll get the courage to say they have a mental illness or help someone they know who does. That’s really the goal.”
To “like” or find out more information about the Just One Thing campaign, visit the Facebook page.
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