Visualising Vulnerability

What was the challenge?

One in four people in the UK is living with a mental health condition. Research shows that students are particularly vulnerable to experiencing issues with their mental health. King’s College London wanted to explore innovative ways to destigmatise experiences of emotional vulnerability within the student and academic communities, whilst encouraging a culture of greater understanding and support.

What did we do?

In collaboration with Dr. Patricia Zuszain, a lecturer in Psychology at King’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, we created a programme of interactive workshops that used a range of art and design-led techniques to encourage students to visualise different emotional states. Participants experimented with imagery, language and physical materials to create wearable objects that expressed hidden stresses and difficulties in a tangible form.

We worked with illustrator Rachel Hill to transform these workshop outputs into a series of illustrations that visually describe how different emotional states may feel for the sufferer. The illustrations were permanently displayed in high footfall locations across the King's campuses.

What was the impact?

Participants credited the project with allowing them to talk more openly and freely about their own mental health, which in turn helped them connect better with the mental illnesses they were studying.

“[We are] always looking at the theory of mental illness, never at how to describe/express it!”
– workshop participant

”Being able to use creativity to explore mental health difficulties is something I find invaluable. Sometimes it is so hard to work out how to say what you are feeling in words and yet having the possibility to make, draw, create and design without a specific end goal enables you to explore without words and maybe, just maybe understand whatever it is a little bit more.”
– workshop participant

The project and its findings were published as a research paper entitled ‘Teaching and discussing mental health among university students: a pilot arts-based study’.