Mental Media Challenge
Role: Communications
The Team
About
The Mental Media Challenge was a competition / grand challenge that I launched with my peers during my junior year of college. At the time I was taking a graduate level course EMM: 505 Leadership in an Age of Transformation. The goal of the class was to design and launch a grand challenge that would have a positive impact on the world. We came up with the Mental Media Challenge in which we asked college students to remix any type of media that currently has a negative message around mental illness and spin it to have a positive message.
Cover / Project Vision
How can media reshape public opinion and destigmatize mental health, specifically depression?
Why does the media portray mental illness so inaccurately? Are artificially stimulating films, news reports, and slang more important than truthfully representing this part our of species? In the US, 43.4 million or 17.9% of our adult population were on record for any mental illness in 2015. Why is this demographic so misrepresented? How can people with mental illness be better understood in our society?
Who are people with mental illness and how can we help empower them?
How can we take an existing piece of media that negatively stigmatizes depression and re-imagine it in a more positive way? To do this, we need help from our community. There is so much creativity here at Champlain College that can be utilized to create a positive message to help so many people suffering in silence. Our goal is to increase awareness of negatively stigmatized media surrounding depression and through our challenge, guide people towards advocacy- spreading a more accurate and positive representation of depression and mental illness overall.
From awareness to advocacy.
I Was Quoted in an Article!
“Elijah Dixson says he wanted to learn how to use media to make a positive change in the world. That’s why he took part in the new Emergent Media graduate course called ‘Leadership in the Age of Transformation’.
‘Media is an incredibly powerful tool,’ says Dixson, and undergraduate student in the Stiller School of Business who is majoring in Game Production Management. ‘Sometimes we use it to help other people, sometimes we don’t’
The course was designed by Ann DeMarle, Associate Dean for Emergent Media, and John Abele, innovator, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and co-founder of Boston Scientific and FIRST Robotics.”
https://www.flipsnack.com/CCMarketing/.html
Final Slide Show
