Poster For Mental Health Awareness

The importance of knowing oneself is most commonly known as a really good thing and is associated with giving a person clarity and a feeling like taking a deep breath of fresh air. Something people don’t really realize while striving for this achievement, is that the journey comes with contemplation of your mental health. Mental health has been pretty overly stigmatized in the media (media suasion) to the point where it is commonly known for being a dangerous or scary thing. On my previous SLATE post, I covered a few examples of how and what the media has stigmatized. Because of this research I thought it would be good to start off with a smaller action to raise awareness as a sort of way to get comfortable with this form of activism. My main idea for this poster was to try and push and move the normalization of people with any kind of mental health issues. More specifically, the conversations of mental health. Since a lot of the time people with these different issues get clumped into a category with other people with different symptoms and clumping people together isn’t known for being great at all, I believe normalizing the conversation of people being different and with many kinds of mental illnesses or not helps make the misconceptions of mental illnesses lessened. “We’re Basically All Struggling With Mental Health Right Now—Let’s Normalize It” by Jessica A Gold explains the importance of these conversations and also gives a few tips on some simple things that you can do to help out as well.

It’s hard to tell when you are making a difference, at least in the beginning, but there are other ways I also try to help this cause in day to day life that I believe does something. I try to have meaningful conversations with people about the states of mental health when it comes up, unless they are really uncomfortable. If they do feel uncomfortable I usually drop the conversation but also bring it up later if I feel like its important. This could feel really bad or really rewarding depending on what kind of person I’m talking to, and a lot of other components also contribute to this as well. It feels good to know that you made a difference in the world, or at least put it out there that you tried and succeeding is kind of a bonus. A big bonus, but a bonus nonetheless. I realized that the idea is primarily to make a change, but trying to do that, and also the intentions and ambition behind it make a difference as well.

The project is never really done for me. I don’t think it’s something that can really be “fixed” but it can definitely be better. Looking back on this project I think I could have and maybe should have chosen a project that was a little more ambitious and less “easy” in a way. I feel like even though this was probably a good first step, this project could’ve had more components to it that made it stand out more or something that made it different. It feels a little like I took the easy way out, but really I think I would have done more if it were a little less time crunched. Overall I think this was a good experience that I can rely on for sources and information to back up the main idea mostly.

(side note) - The watermark was very much unintentional and I couldn’t get rid of it so sorry if it’s a little bit more difficult to read because of that.