Hosting Focus Groups

Through hosting creative activity-based workshops, I have been collecting honest, first-hand experiences from young people in relation to their mental health. Using the information gathered from these activities and discussions I determined 3 key themes; medication, barriers to accessing support and stigma. Using these themes, I have been developing a series of works.

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Medication

From discussions that took place during the focus groups, it became evident that young people consider mental health support and care to feel very clinical. In particular, participants commented on feeling ill-informed, anxious and confused about the use and role of medication on their treatment. This work is a visual interpretation of these discussions. Using machine learning to generate fictional medication names, I have been designing and assembling my own medication packaging. My intention is for this packaging to be convincing and mistaken for real prescription medications, thus highlighting how trivial and alien medication names, and the role of such medications, can feel to a young person.

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Barriers to Accessing Support

For this study I have been working with one young person to develop an augmented reality application that communicates some of the barriers they have encountered when accessing support for their mental health. The main challenge this young person faced was consistently relying on telephone communication to access such services – something they found impossible due to the nature of their anxiety. Using the AR application, audio and animations are activated when visual triggers are detected. These visual triggers are fictional correspondence inspired by the real correspondence the young person received - one of the most significant being a self-referral card. While a self-referral system might seem practical for service delivery, and can even seem insignificant to others, it can be a huge barrier to some users who need to access the service. In this work I hope to communicate the emotional implications of such systems and how they can be counter-productive for young people in the treatment of mental ill-health.

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Stigma

Stigma is still a significant barrier when it comes to young people talking openly about their mental health. When a young person experiences stigma they can begin to feel their mental health condition defines who they are. Using the Tobii eye-tracker and Processing I have been developing an interactive installation that features video interviews of three young people talking about their experiences of mental ill-health and associated stigma. These video interviews are initially distorted with stigmatising phrases the young person has experienced. When the eye-tracker detects that someone is gazing at the display the video becomes less distorted – and the user begins to ‘see’ the person beneath the stigma and hear their story.

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Sally’s practice primarily focuses on ideas and issues related to mental health. From experiencing mental health problems herself, Sally has become passionate about using her personal lived experience and creative practice to open up much needed conversation and challenge existing stigma and ill-informed perceptions of mental health problems. She uses technology to develop interactive and immersive audio and visual experiences that communicate the often hard to explain realities of living with a mental health problem.

Sally often combines her creative practice with her voluntary youth work role at See Me Scotland. In her most recent work Sally has been working closely with other young people from See Me to develop a series of engaging and interactive works that communicate voices, lived experiences, challenges and stigma that young people face in relation to mental health. This work focuses on three key themes; stigma, medication and barriers to accessing support.