The taboo surrounding mental disorders
I've always been fascinated with how the human mind works, this includes my interest in mental disorders and the negative stigma that surrounds them. The negative stigma prompted me to address this issue and hopefully make people more aware of the fact that not all mental disorders are necessarily bad.
I decided to focus on one mental disorder for now: schizophrenia. The underlying idea has always been: "How can I help people (with this project)?"
Research
I had a ton of questions, such as: "What is schizophrenia? How is it treated? What is a psychosis? What are the statistics on schizophrenia?"
I decided to contact a facility that treats schizophrenia patients, run by people who themselves have (controlled) schizophrenia. Not only were they able to answer all of my questions, they also told me that they were in need of new ways to convey schizophrenia to the patient's loved ones who previously had no experience handling this mental illness.
My focus became: "How can I make the loved ones of the patient understand this mental disorder?".
The answer proved faily simple: Make them experience it for themselves!
Concept
It turns out that schizophrenia patients have a different thinking pattern. There's a chemical reaction that takes place in the brain. Patients describe their schizophrenia as a distored reality.
So I thought to myself: "What goes on inside their head during a psychosis?".
After many interviews with patients and their loved ones I gathered that they feel a lack of understanding and trapped within their own minds. I wanted to try and convey this to the target audience to get the most authentic feeling possible, so I placed myself in the patients position and started the creative process.
Creative process
I played with the idea of psychedelic colors but this wasn't quite a distorted reality. I decided to combine these results with actual reality.
Scenarios
I started writing scenarios. I focused on every day events that we as (Dutch) people experience daily. Such as: being in a public square or waiting for your train at the train station.
My idea was to present the audience with an every day event provided with voice commentary. The scenario then changes from a normal- to a psychosis scenario, letting the audience experience how it's like to have a psychosis of their own. The voice will change along, it could go from a calm voice to a frantic and manic voice. The manic voice might even try to convince you to harm yourself or others.
I exported these scenarios as .MP4 files with 360 degree metadata to be implemented into YouTube, where I would be able to test them with my mobile device and a virtual reality headset.
Reception
The audience was getting immersed into the experiences. They went in without having a clue what schizophrenia meant and came out of it thinking they understand the mental illness more.
Application
To provide the audience with the experiences I needed to build an mobile application where I could feature them and where there would be room for expansion, more experiences, in the future.
I build a responsive mobile prototype in jQuery Mobile which in the future gives me the opportunity to make it into a hybrid application.
Promotion
The application will be used within a clinical setting. Newly diagnosed schizophrenia patients and their loved ones will meet with an expert on the field to discuss the mental disorder. In this setting the expert will be able to provide the loved ones with the experience.
Some posters were put up in the clinics to promote the app. It reads (in Dutch): "Schizophrenia. What goes on inside their head?" and "Consult your doctor".
