REACH OUT! YOU ARE NOT ALONE

Mental health problems normally emerge between the ages of 15 and 24 (Hunt, Eisenberg, 2010). They have effects in employability and academic success later in life. University students have a higher prevalence for depression than the general population. Accumulated evidence show that a third of the undergraduates are affected by depression (Ibrahim et al., 2013) while another article claim 1 in 5 show symptoms of general mental health issues (Rosenberg, 2018). Even though the university provides services for the students’ wellbeing, we are sure that plenty of students are not aware of them. The students that do know them maybe scared of going to therapies or are scared of taking medication since they don’t believe it’s going to help them. Some students are unaware of having these problems since they classified their anxiety and even in some cases depression as something normal amongst students. Also, there are barriers to the services including knowledge about these services that the universities provides and concerns about privacy or stigma. One of the main reason why people try to avoid going to therapies are because it is still sociable unacceptable. Many people believe that those who go to therapies are “crazy”. Fewer students go to counselling or seek help even though they have been identified with mental health problems (Eisenberg, Golberstein, & Gollust, 2007; Macaskill, 2012) and it can raise other indirect difficulties such as getting lower grades, eating disorders, financial problems, etc., (Rosenberg, 2018) such that it create negative feedback loops.
We thought that an awareness campaign was going to be effective for reducing the unknown mental health services that the university provides for students to engage with and to encourage students that are afraid to ask for help since having a mental illness after all is not rare and there is no necessity to feel alone. We’ve decided to use a poster as a way to convey the message. However, we were not able to agree with what technique we wanted to use. Therefore, we decided for our best interest to make two separate posters using different approaches to evoke arousal and emotions differently from the target audience which may result in two different paths to communicate the same message and subsequently result in the same behavior change (getting help). In addition, the dark poster has a specific target audience: the second year undergraduates, because they are the group that have significantly increased psychiatric symptoms (Macaskill, 2012). By pointing the finger at them, this is essentially eliminating uncertainty between audiences but reducing the impact for other year groups.

As we have seen in class, the Yale Attitude Change Approach states that persuasion is influenced by three factors: the source, the message and the audience. We wanted to make the posters attractive, salience (black and yellow backgrounds, capitalized and big size words, colour contrast) and with a clear message, using just few words so it would catch students’ attention and would be easier and faster for them to read. The first idea was to put them up on walls across the university but then we decided to publish them on social media so people could see them even if they weren’t at the university and could become familiarized with them, because it has been proved that the more we see something the more we like it. Both posters provide contact information of the Well-Being Service to make it easier to reach out and ask for help. Including details from the university will create a social involvement feeling since students will believe that other students use these services so they will be encouraged to seek help too. Social influence, also known as social proof, refers to how people’s emotions and behaviors are influenced but the people around them. Humans believe that if a person close to them behaves or feel one way, that action or emotion becomes normalized, therefore it’s easier to carry out. The yellow poster uses the words “YOU ARE NOT ALONE” to reflect this phenomenon. We need to take into consideration that some students suffer from social conformity where they want to be socially accepted. Once students open up about going to therapy and getting help, more students will follow.
Also, following The Elaboration-Likelihood Model, which states that different routes (central/logical or peripheral/desire) have different ways of influencing people, the posters were created to increase the persuasion by including messages (in a statistics and quotes form) that will make the students think logically about their mental state (central path). In the dark poster, the bold and red words ‘DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS’ are used because it is a ‘door in the face’ technique that is meant to be unintuitive, even intrusive, in order to grab attention through the peripheral route and subsequently shift towards the central route with the latter phrase “occur most in second year undergraduates”. This poster is also associated with how the general public seeks out negative information and therefore attention grabbing. However, due the fact that there is increasingly more negative information in this digital era, it may prompt the idea of social risk amplification, which may subsequently dilute the idea of using negative information to grab attention.
The problem is evident, people with illnesses tend not to report explicitly about their illnesses or their recovery, especially not in the form of social media. One possible way of measuring the effect of the posters is to ask the wellbeing services if the number of clients have increased since the posters were published.




REFERENCES:
1. Dixon, S., K., & Kurpius, S., E., R., (2008). Depression and college stress among university undergraduates: do mattering and self-esteem make a difference? Journal of College Student Development, 49(5), 412-424.
2. Eisenberg, D., Golberstein, E., & Gollust, S., E., (2007). Help-seeking and access to mental health care in a university student population. Medical Care, 45(7), 594-601.
3. Hunt, J., & Eisenberg, D. (2010). Mental health problems and help-seeking behavior among college students. Journal of adolescent health, 46(1), 3-10.
4. Ibrahim, A., K., Kelly, S., J., Adams, C., E., & Glazebrook, C., (2013). A systematic review of studies of depression prevalence in university students. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 47, 391-400.
5. Macaskill, A., (2012). University student mental health in crisis: a united kingdom perspective. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 41(4), 426-441.
6. Mazzeo, S., E., & Espelage, D., L., (2002). Association between childhood physical and emotional abuse and disordered eating behaviors in female undergraduates: an investigation of the mediating role of alexithymia and depression. Journal of Counselling Psychology, 49(1), 86-100.
7. Rosenberg, D., (2018). 1 in 5 college students have anxiety or depression, here’s why. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/1-in-5-college-students-have-anxiety-or-depression-heres-why-90440