Through a $121,798, two-year, Think Big for Kids grant from YouthBridge Community Foundation, Story Stitchers is creating a series of public service announcements (PSAs) to help change the stigma around mental health care and provide information on accessing it.
Read the Youthbridge newsletter article HERE
Perception Isn’t Always Reality: Mental Health will reduce stigma of mental health care among Black youth in St. Louis City and County through the creation and dissemination of a public service announcement (PSA) campaign. The 24-month project will be led by 10 youth (ages 16-24) and adult artist-mentors working in collaboration with health experts; community residents; and marketing, media, and communication professionals.
The resulting fact-based, peer-to-peer messaging will reach a wide audience through billboards and public transportation ads in North St. Louis City and County and social media and radio ads through the greater region. Youth are viewed as trusted messengers, driving regional change in knowledge and attitudes on mental illness and accessing mental health care.
Project Status UPDate
Emeara Burns, Project Coordinator
Branden Lewis, Youth Artistic Coordinator
Chris Pendleton, Teaching Artist and Senior Audio Producer
Ten Youth Interns have been meeting weekly.
Work is progressing and next steps with SPOT Content Studio are coming soon.
STORY CIRCLE
Story Stitchers Perception Youth Interns Bryson, Houston, Keith and Arron as well as additional youth Alexis, Bella, Sean, and Jamia, and mentoring artist Tyrus Watson aka Small Talk were joined by Christine Watridge, a manager of The Health Communication Research Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, and Kahryn Dickerson, a life coach and marketing specialist. Recordings were made at The Center, 3701 Grandel Sq, Studio 1A on October 27, 2023.
Listen to the podcasts:
Excerpt from the discussion:
What do you think is the most common issue concerning mental health?
Speaker 5: Mainly just people being in denial or not knowing how to face your traumas. Triggering point. Not knowing how to deal with it or how to confront it. Or what to do when it hits you. That’s usually what I see.
Speaker 4: I would say the most important thing I notice from teaching kids and being able to watch young adults become adults, a lot of times it’s not them not knowing who they are.
So when you are younger, you kind of already know what you are at 10. You really don’t know that you know that, but the things that you love, you love it really hard around seven to 10 years old when your conscious kick in.
But when you get older, you start worrying about what people think and you find influencers that shouldn’t be influenced by you or you shouldn’t be influenced by them. And then you kind of get lost into where you’re supposed to be based off influence. So not knowing who you are and accepting who you are, not knowing what you’re capable of, not knowing what you’re good at…That’s the hardest part for a lot of people in my career.
Speaker 1: And I agree with what you all said too, and sometimes I think it’s not denial, sometimes it’s just lack of education, lack of knowledge about mental health or the specific mental health illness that you may be dealing with. So I think sometimes it may just be the problem may be identifying what you’re going through, so not being able to understand what you’re going through. So it’s like how can I accept something I don’t understand.
Speaker 3: I think that’s a very good point. I was actually going to say a lack of awareness or that’s the thing that I see the most of being in Story Stitchers. I realize that if I wasn’t here then I probably wouldn’t know as much either. And so I think a lack of awareness is really, really big. Being able to, not only being aware of when you’re angry and why you’re angry or whatever that emotion may be, but also being aware of when other people are angry or whatever. Again, whatever emotion it may be.
Speaker 1: Emotional intelligence.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, absolutely. So then you might have somebody snap on you or whatnot and you realize like, wow, they’re not even snapping on me right now. I’m not even the one that they mad at right now and stuff like that come with learning. And those things just aren’t really taught so much in everyday life, at least for the people around me. You can’t teach something that you don’t know and you don’t know what you don’t know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wanted to add on to that, thinking about generational differences too. If you’re surrounded by family members who’ve never known about resources or thought about it in that way, then it’s going to be harder for you to go to them to ask them for a resource. So I think connecting those bridges, and not only educating yourself, but sharing what you learned with everyone around you can be really important.
Speaker 3: Agree, agree,
Speaker 1: But hard to do.
Speaker 3: A lot of the people I be around, like my peer group, they seem to care about how they look in other people’s eyes. So they might not be like, oh, I got a problem. That might make ’em seem weak in a way. So they worry about other people, opinion looking vulnerable.
StitchCast Studio Special Edition: Mental Health recognized by PBS with a link on the PBS Resources for Courageous Conversations website.
Collaborative partner Matthew W. Kreuter, PhD, MPH, Kahn Family Professor of Public Health and Director, Health Communication Research Laboratory at the Institute of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis wrote, “Story Stitchers works with and within the communities they serve using a collaborative approach between professional and youth artists. These collaborations produce works of extraordinary insight and vulnerability as artists reflect their own experiences and those of their peers and neighbors. Their work centers voices within the community using innovative approaches to storytelling. Story Stitchers has an extensive history of successful programming and collaborative impact that has positively engaged communities in St. Louis City and County.”
Keely Finney, LCSW, Patient Advisory Board member and mental health clinician is a member of the mental health professional project advisory team.
Christine Watridge, a manager of The Health Communication Research Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, and Kahryn Dickerson, a life coach and marketing specialist are members of the mental health professional project advisory team and participated in the October 27, 2023 Story Circle on mental health.
Socioeconomic status and mental health are intrinsically connected; improvement in one enables improvement in the other. This innovative PSA project can be easily replicated to tackle stigma, misinformation, and distrust contributing to many other problems facing youth.
Previous PSA Work by Saint Louis Story Stitchers:
For the CDC Foundation in 2022: Perception Isn’t Always Reality: Covid 19
Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artist Collective’s Perception Isn’t Always Reality will engage BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) teen and young adult artists to reevaluate messages they may have received about COVID and vaccinations and to evaluate the sources of the information. Through their own brand of urban storytelling that involves collaborative work in hip hop music and krump dance, videography, photography, and podcasting, the artists will produce a challenging body of work for the public to experience on urban canvases such as the sides of city buses and on the airwaves.
For the St. Louis Violence Prevention Commission in 2022: SAFE! Team
Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective produced a PSA campaign to support public health and safety education to reduce unintentional shootings involving children and youth in St. Louis. According to 5 On Your Side data, 140 children under the age of 17 were victims of gun violence in 2022 in the St. Louis area of Missouri and Illinois. Eighteen of them died.
