This project aims to acknowledge the past, present (during pandemic), and future of mental health and its advocacy.

We have been left to adapt with new lives and new routines, at the expense of not only our physical but mental well being.

This event is happening in real time. It’s hard to say what the consequences will be of this. Nonetheless, we are all coping, somehow, in our own ways. As the futility of many societal structures reveals itself, we are provoked to question what really matters to us. What is worth expending mental energy, and what isn’t? Everyone will answer this question differently, but no matter how you go about it, it’s mentally taxing to do so.

Thus, this project illuminates how people are finding ways to cope in the face of uncertainty, contingent on mental health discourse. In a society where we have slowly destigmatizing mental illness, how will this continue to develop in the coming days, where people are losing not only the structure in their lives but at worse, the things and/or people that they love?

This work will also explore indications of coping mechanisms that we’ve flocked to (technology vs nature), as well as the nuanced experiences that people have with their own mental health.

For ease of conceptualization (and avoiding romanticized tropes about mental illness), we seem to manifest as islands right now—we are very much separated from one another, and we are not exactly self sufficient, but will find ways to keep sustaining each other.

My one hope from this project is to provoke someone to think about this topic in a different light, especially if they’ve avoided this topic or didn’t care for the idea of mental health. I hope that a more honest approach in my work could allow for this.