Josh Chauvin - Video Testimonials Can Help "Transcend Social Barriers"

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Feb 06, 2015
by Stuart Milne and Jonathan Elbaz
Josh Chauvin - Video Testimonials Can Help "Transcend Social Barriers"

Chairman of the Mind Your Head Campaign and director of video-sharing project It Gets Brighter describes building a sense of community among mental health patients

Josh Chauvin speaks during session 536

Josh Chauvin has a burning passion for reducing the stigma attached to mental health, and has worked to combat prejudice during his Master's and Doctoral studies at Oxford, UK, and in his native Canada. In an interview with Salzburg Global at the session New Paradigms for Behavioral and Mental Health Care, he shared his experiences of how video technology can help mental health patients share their stories and realize they are not alone.

Chauvin first came to understand the potential of the film medium when making a documentary on the stigma against HIV and AIDS sufferers, which connected him to the Canadian Mental Health Association.

“They got me on board to do consulting work for them, and the consulting work exposed me to the world where patients were not going out and getting the help they needed because of the tremendous social barriers,” he said.

“That is when I started to become alive to that, but I did not do anything about it.”

That changed when he arrived in Oxford and became involved in student activist groups. A year later he became chairman of Mind Your Head, an organization aiming to tackle discrimination surrounding mental health issues, particularly among students.

It soon became clear to him that providing mental health patients with outlets to share their stories with each other and the wider world would be a key weapon in the group’s arsenal, beginning with written testimonials.

“It was very important to attach faces to names associated with those testimonials, because we thought if you could feel like you knew the person … if you could see them around town cycling, at social events just like anyone else, acting like a 'normal' person ... that transcends certain social barriers. We thought a natural step beyond that was to do video testimonials.”

Mind Your Head drew inspiration from the It Gets Better campaign, launched in September 2010 in response to the suicides of several American teenagers who had fallen victim to homophobic bullying. The initiative soon prompted thousands of people to share video messages of support for the LGBT community, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

“The It Gets Better campaign certainly brought it to the forefront by the power of seeing someone tell their story, often times very heart-wrenching and emotionally provocative, in terms of changing people’s perception of things and really starting movements.”

In January, Mind Your Head launched its own video project, It Gets Brighter, with the aim of drawing a similar response to mental health issues. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and comedienne Ruby Wax have already submitted contributions.

Chauvin hopes the process of creating and sharing videos will be a therapeutic and rewarding experience for mental health sufferers.

“It lets them know that they are not alone in their suffering,” he explains. “Going to the site, they will be confronted with what we hope will be thousands of videos, at some point, and that in itself will make a statement of a community that wants to embrace them. To be a part of that, and to see that, is empowering.

“The effect is the cathartic feeling one gets from telling their story to someone else, and getting a response from another sharing mutual feelings. ‘My best friend suffered from this as well, my mother, brother, sister, father suffered from this too,’ all builds a sense of community and goes to some miles in terms of transcending those barriers and those stigmas associated with mental health issues.”

One of the benefits Chauvin enjoyed during his time at Salzburg Global was the opportunity to network with others in the mental health sector and explore the possibilities of bringing communities together. He recalls a particularly fruitful discussion with Sally Okun, vice president of US-based data sharing platform PatientsLikeMe.

“On our website the videos are only one minute of a hopeful message on how it gets brighter, but obviously there is more to a person’s story. So one thing Sally and I were talking about was directing people from It Gets Brighter to PatientsLikeMe. It would be a great way to connect people on a more personal level.”

Chauvin is pleased with the work being done on mental health in his home country of Canada, but realizes there is a lot health care professionals and activists across the globe can learn from each other.

“The Salzburg Global experience has allowed me to see the phenomenal variety of experiences that there is. The mental health issue in Canada is very different from the mental health issue Ghana, Uganda, or the UK. There are variety of social factors that influence the way we not only see and interpret mental health issues, but also how we respond.

“I have become alive to the world of perceptions that is out there and the social factor that might be influencing our perception, I think, is a big takeaway.”
 


Josh Chauvin was a participant at the Salzburg Global program New Paradigms for Behavioral and Mental Health Care, which is part of the multi-year series Health and Health Care Innovation in the 21st Century. The session was hosted in partnership with the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science. More information on the session can be found here: www.salzburgglobal.org/go/536.