Foundry BC: making mental health approachable to teenage boys who don’t want to talk about their feelings.
Foundry is a mental health service provider for young people in British Columbia that were having trouble reaching teenage men. Whether you looked at center visitation, website traffic, or social media engagement, girls outnumbered boys two to one.
Put more eloquently by someone who ran one of the centers:
“Most guys think that if you get help, you’re a pussy.”
Our job was finding a way to break through to them.
After a series of one-on-one interviews and an analysis of entry form data, we quickly realized that most teenage boys are familiar with the symptoms of mental health conditions, but don’t think labels like “anxiety” or “depression” applied to them.
Those words belonged to the caricatures of mental health they saw on TV and in solemn black and white posters about depression around their school. When we offered help for mental health, they thought we were offering help to those caricatures, not them.
The creative brief was to show what anxiety and depression felt like without using the words anxiety or depression. The result was a campaign of portraits that capture the brave face we put on when we say “everything is fine”, but we’re really not.
Results
After 2 months, 1 in 5 teenage boys across the province knew about Foundry, up 2x. 9,000 young men accessed services that otherwise would not have. Schools that did not receive campaign posters in the original distribution run of the posters, put in special orders for more posters.
The campaign was presented at International Association for Youth Mental Health Conference in Australia, an academic conference, as an example of how the creative industry and health authorities can work together to solve challenging problems.