Earlier this year, we helped launch the callout campaign for I Hope This Helps, a new crowdsourced film about mental health, from the makers of Life in a Day, and commissioned by Wellcome, one of the world’s biggest funders of mental health research.
Creating work around the subject of mental health is inherently complex: it’s a subject that is little understood, extremely emotive, and full of sensitivities. Scientific perspectives can be complex too.
But with 1 in 4 people experiencing mental health problems, accepting the status quo isn’t an option. As an industry, we need to find ways to embrace the communication challenges, and use our creativity to widen understanding and inspire change.
Over the last few years of working with Wellcome, particularly on the campaign for I Hope This Helps, we’ve learned some valuable lessons. Working on these types of campaigns has helped us talk to each other with clarity and warmth, whether we’re members of the public, scientists or other stakeholders.
Embrace the tensions that arise while talking about mental health
The goal of the I Hope This Helps campaign was to inspire people all around the world to submit videos about their mental health journey, to be edited into a feature documentary film, exec produced by Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald.
It’s a hugely ambitious project and an epic end-goal, but the footage the filmmakers hoped to receive to make it was the opposite: personal, human and vulnerable. Meanwhile, the subject matter had to be treated sensitively.
Our solution was to let these tensions push up against each other within the work itself: we set the film’s name in a big and impactful type that spoke to the scale and ambition of the project. Then we integrated it into actual UGC footage of real people. Sometimes the logo is clear, sometimes it is obscured by moments of tenderness, sadness and joy. It’s bold, delicate, simple and messy - like the subject matter itself.
The identity was rolled out across the project’s website and callout campaign, and submissions for the film are open now.
Push away from the cliches, to encourage new perspectives
For the last 50 years, mental health problems have largely been treated in only two ways: talking therapies and drugs. But most people who suffer from anxiety and depression don’t get access to either, and for those that do, improvement is far from guaranteed.
In 2020 Wellcome announced a huge fund for mental health research, and a new way of thinking about the whole field. Named ‘Active Ingredients’, a core idea was that in addition to the traditional modes of the treatment, there were all kinds of other things that could help - from personal action like exercise, to societal changes like creating more access to green space. We just needed to understand them better.
To bring this idea to life, we created a visual metaphor of a ‘mental health storecupboard’, full of ingredients that could be chosen, mixed, or rejected according to personal requirement or taste.
Creating 3D models of household foodstuffs, we then replaced the expected product name with Wellcome’s active ingredients. We wrapped this playful imagery in a storytelling narrative and presentation.
Wellcome’s success in this field will come from getting people to look again at this topic, and the imagery and associated narrative was used by senior Wellcome execs online and at events, as a key communication tool to bring stakeholders and the general public along the journey.
The most powerful voices are from those with lived experience of mental health challenges
Mental health is a subject that everyone has a lot to say about: from experts, to charities, to brands, to celebrities.
But we’ve consistently seen that the most powerful words come from those who have experienced difficulties themselves. Often our job as creatives and producers is to find ways to harness those words, and re-present them to audiences in ways that can create empathy and impact. Indeed, that is very much the mission behind the I Hope This Helps film.
This was also the driving idea behind Something Changed, a short film we produced during the pandemic. We captured testimony from almost hundred young people around the world, about how they managed their mental health during lockdowns. We then worked with South African performance poet Koleka Putuma and director Ivvy Chenn to translate these stories into a beautiful and moving animation that captured a unique moment, and how we collectively coped through it.
Approaching complex subjects with empathy
When we receive briefs like these, even when they are complex or technical, we try to approach them in a way that’s fully human. By placing the campaign around the real individuals involved, we’re able to provoke an emotional reaction from the viewer. Ultimately, everyone’s journey with mental health is their own and letting individuals tell their own stories felt like the most empathetic way of responding.