Mental Health Mythical Creatures
Using cultural probes to reach excluded populations
What are cultural probes?
Cultural Probes are often used in the context of user-centred design or anthropological research to gather insight into individuals’ lives, experiences, and perspectives. They typically consist of a set of open-ended activities or prompts, that might take the form of creative tasks or diaries, designed to elicit personal and cultural insights from participants.
As part of a wider project with Mind’s Children and Young People team, we used cultural probes to understand young people’s experiences of and preferences for mental health support. The specific activity we asked people to complete was called ‘Mental Health Mythical Creatures.’ The task was to create a mythical creature which resembled their dream mental health service — its head was meant to represent how they would like to communicate with this service, its body signified the type of support they would like to receive, and its legs signified how it would reach them. They were also asked to draw themselves with the creature in an environment where they would like to meet it.
Asking the children and young people we were working with (aged 11–25) to do this, helped us engage with participants who otherwise would have been unable to meaningfully articulate their needs in a typical interview setting.
The young people we engaged represented marginalised groups that Mind had previously struggled to reach, and whose voices were often the least heard in mental health research. We posted these probe packs out to participants, alongside a mental health support diary to complete over 2 weeks. Once the completed probes were returned, we ran interviews to unpack what the participants had written and created.
Here is one example of a mental health mythical creature inspired by this 12-year-old’s love for the weird-core aesthetic. The creature named Aalto had various features to support them such as an eye that sees people differently (in a friendly way), could float around in order to proactively spot people who needed help, and when depicted in situ, the creature acts as a protection in a sea of unfriendly eyes.
This is another example of a mental health mythical creature. Depicted is a leprechaun — known for being cheeky and naughty — with a strong physique and no ears. The participant described how and why he would be more comfortable opening up to a masculine figure, and explained he had no ears as despite wanting to open up, he still wasn’t sure that he wanted anyone to be able to hear him. He’s shown to be meeting the participant on the moon to ensure that others around them are unable to see or hear their conversation.
As you can see through these examples, the mythical creatures hold clear symbolic representations, metaphorical insights and a structure around which participants were able to explore their mental health support needs.
In all cases, the mythical creatures enhanced our understanding of their individual needs for support, and in a few cases, their drawings were vital in communicating these needs that otherwise would have been uncomfortable to discuss or hard to articulate, be this through attention span, language barriers or shame around the subject matter.
If you’d like to find out more about anything mentioned in the article, feel free to get in touch!
