Mental Health in the Digital Age
All of us have it, yet no one experiences it in the exact same way. It is our mental health, and the presence of mental illness in our daily lives. The alarmingly high rates of suicide and even higher reported cases of mental illness in the United States show that the issue is still as prevalent and urgent as ever. Not only is it a national issue, but an extremely local issue as well. Change is happening in our home, at the University of Missouri. After a close, lifelong friend chose to take his life, Alex Lindley, a former Mizzou student, co-founded Project Wake Up in association with the Missouri Suicide Prevention Coalition. The movement has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause, as well as incentivized the creation of several promotional videos to spread their message: we must ‘start the conversation’ in order to end the stigma around mental illness. In an attempt to take that first step, Nate Townsend directed a digital video short in 2015 called “Wake Up: Let’s End the Stigma.” The video takes advantage of the current cultural comfort in discussing difficult topics from behind a screen, widespread access to digital media, as well as the increase of time spent consuming that media.
Director Nate Townsend’s “Wake Up: Let’s End the Stigma” uses a variety of features and tactics in order to bring justice to the gravity of the subject as well as make it clear as to where we go from this starting point. The video begins with a voiceover from a man telling a deeply personal story. Eventually viewers are brought face-to-face with this man (revealed to be Project Wake Up co-founder, Alex Lindley) in a simplistic interview-style shot. The sit-down approach to his storytelling is necessary in order for viewers to feel the most immediately connected to his story. Townsend understood that in order to humanize the friend who committed suicide, Ryan, viewers would need to look into the eyes and see the emotion of those who were closest to Ryan, while they describe him.
In order to increase emotional appeal, Townsend adds jump cuts between old childhood photos and new videos of friends honoring him. He also includes quality use of aesthetic camera work, overall musical ambiance, and color scheme editing of the footage in order to match the societal significance of the content. Though these crucial components of video-creation have been around for a while, the editing techniques would not have been able to be put to use for a topic as sensitive as this unless it was created in this past decade.
Mogul social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and most recently TikTok, have become a voice for the “everyday man” in the last decade, thereby creating a culture of oversharing. Teens and adults alike have found a certain ease in talking about emotion-provoking subjects on the Internet since there is no face-to-face interaction happening. This relatively uncharted territory has brought both positive and negative effects on mental health. On one hand, accounts of cyberbullying, or online bullying, have skyrocketed since the dawn of texting/posting ‘at’ others. There is no repercussion of being there for an in-person reaction, nor discovering your identity hence the luxury of online anonymity. On the other hand, posting online (anonymous or not) in order to share feelings and find common ground with strangers who empathize has never been more relevant and commonplace. This is a phenomenon that has only developed with the relatively recent creation of social media applications for the relatively recent creation of smartphones. This is a comfortability that was not so comfortable in prior decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Though videos, like Nate Townsend’s 2015 “Wake Up: Let’s End the Stigma” video, could have been edited like so in the past, there is a high chance that the content would not be as deep nor dark as the Wake Up video’s content of depression and suicide. It is instances like this 2015 video where the positives have surely outweighed the negatives in terms of what they were able to achieve within the customs of our current digital age.
Because the “Wake Up: Let’s End the Stigma” video was not meant to be broadcasted on a commercial slot, there were essentially no limits, time-wise or content-wise, to what they could do with their digital platform. The video was distributed on YouTube and primarily shared through a GoFundMe link: open to followings, comments, shares, and most importantly, donations. All of which were not fathomable to be so closely attached to a digital video before the last decade. A video website like YouTube does not have any strict time limits for videos posted, therefore Townsend had complete control over exactly how long was appropriate when considering the topic and story narrative. With low production costs, the video was also able to be more locally focused and specific to the Mizzou environment because of the story’s close ties to Columbia. These premises allowed for an uncomplicated sharing and donating process; therefore a quality-produced supporting video paved the way for a successful first campaign of a growing movement.
While our culture has improved upon opening up the mental health conversation over the last five years, the journey to eradicate suicide has only just begun. Since this original, unique product of the digital age, Nate Townsend has created several more videos for a variety of mediums in association with Project Wake Up, including a commercial Public Service Announcement and (most recently) a full-feature length documentary that was a part of the online 2020 Tribeca’s We Are One Global Film Festival. Project Wake Up’s goal to increase awareness, involvement, and therefore become more effective in the prevention of suicide would not have been possible without the public, digital success of Project Wake Up’s first video short, “Wake Up: Let’s End the Stigma.” The Internet Age we are living in provides an ever-evolving space to ‘start the conversation’ on critical topics, like mental health.
