According to the World Health Organization (WHO), someone around the globe commits suicide every 40 seconds.
These words mean nothing, if it has never happened personally to us. There are millions of reasons, why people decide to take their lives. A humans’ brain is the most mysterious and perplexing part of anyone and everyone. Doctors, scientists, and ordinary people raise many questions about cause-and-effect relationships between the decisions people make and their ratiocination. Of course, life itself is a continuance and circulation of ups and downs.
But what is the most hazardous life span of stress? This particular question can be easily answered. There is nothing more rigid than the life of a student. Early adulthood is a period of time, when people go through many types of transformation and form their personality.
In Canada, suicide accounts for 24 percent of all deaths among 15-24 year olds
Life becomes a synonym of pressure. Parents, teachers, and peers push the youth to make choices, which will affect the future well-being or become a reason of a failure. If it looks like the only problem the youth is suffering from, than the answer is no.
There are also such reasons of stress as:
- Financial problems
- Low Self-Esteem
- Feeling of Loneliness or Hopefulness
- Bullying
- Social Interaction Problems
- Academic Stress
This is just a short list of the issues youth have to overcome. They feel that they have to resolve these problems by themselves and no one is around to give a helping hand.
Having all these obstacles in their lives students start suffering from uncertainty and confusion, and these negative feelings can become the seeds of melancholy, and, later on, depression. The world of the youth becomes nothing but a dark place. This darkness slowly transformers into the massive black hole, which takes all the positive feelings and energy away. It is formidable to fight against the black hole by yourself. If the fight is lost, the war could be lost, too.
Everyone was a teenager once, and the memories of hard times would never be washed away. If every member of society understands what it means to be drowning in the sea of desperation, why don’t we ask ourselves how to help those who experience it now? If this question arises once, we will never forget how much it means just to say hello.
Every conversation starts with this simple word, but we underestimate the power of it. To help students better understand the consequence of raising the topic of mental health, such organizations as The Friendship Bench exist. It aids students to recognize the signs of depression among their peers and encourages them to offer help or ask for it. The main concept is developed by the organization is defined in simple words: #YellowIsForHello.
It means that saying Hello can be crucial for somebody and helps to involve a person into a friendly, supportive dialogue. This small warm talk can evolve all the negative feeling the person experiences and pushes him to share the problems either with a professional.
If students feel ashamed to talk to parents or professionals, there is nothing better than to have an amiable conversation with a friend or classmate. We share the same values and can relate to the certain problems due to the similar lifestyles. Friends can notice and recognize if their friends start suffering with some sort of mental illness, and this is where it is time to say hello. It requires nothing to exchange the positive feeling, which can prevent others from the serious mental problems and depression. Being a friend means to be responsible for your friends and take care of them. It could be enough to make the world a better place.
This is what The Friendship Bench tries to explain to the Canadian youth. They also use the Yellow colour to grab students’ attention. It induces the positive emotions, because many of good things are associated with the colour. What if saying Hello, brings some sunlight to a person’s life. This is why #YellowIsForHello.
Being a college student, I feel the personal connection to the topic of increasing the awareness of the mental health. It is not a disease, someone should be embarrassed to discuss, but the hot topic, which is spread among the local community, and as a result, the society as a whole. There is nothing more important than to discuss the concerns regarding emotional well-being.
The other question is the mental trauma can be so serious, that a friendly conversation isn’t able to help anymore. When I was 14 years old, my classmate committed suicide. We were not close friends, but used to have conversations about what was going on in school or life. We had the same hobbies and talked about them as well. She was a quiet girl, whom I saw as an introvert before she took her own life. After her funeral, the truth revealed. She shared with few of her friends the problems regarding her parents’ divorce. That traumatic event became the reason of developing more serious problems, including emotional neglect, and severe depression. She never asked for professional help, and her friends never shared with any of the adults about what she was going through.
This is the other reason why such organizations as The Friendship Bench exist. They are ready to help with all the concerns and problems, as teenagers should realize that it is critical to share their feelings with someone else. There are many professionals, who want to help but simply unaware of the problems of students. We have to stand up for our friends and ourselves and not be afraid to say HELLO and ask for help. The mental health shouldn’t be a taboo; it should be a subject matter within any local community.
“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Living a happy life requires a lot of work. We must understand that every human being can be weak sometimes and there is nothing to be agitated about. The world is suffering from ignorance and silence. People are afraid to be rejected and used to hide their true feeling deep inside. Every single person can prevent and stop this, by simply saying Hello.
To learn more about The Friendship Bench go to:
Visual Content Considerations:
Visual content grabs customers’ attention and reduce the time spent on digesting information. It also helps to increase Social Media engagement because it is easier to share and exchange the visual content rather than the plain text.
- Solid colours and simple design
- Attention-grabbing content
- Easy-to-read font
- Smooth structure
- Use colours, which are related to the brand and resonate with your target market to reduce customer’s confusion
- Balance the white space to reduce the clutter
Rationale:
- Content that contains relevant images has, on average, 94% more total views than content without images.
- Views can increase up to 48% by incorporating both photos and videos in the content.
- Infographics are shared twice as often as presentations and three times as often as plain documents through social media channels. (Mad Fish Digital: Seeing is Believing: Capture & Engage Your Audience with Visual Content).
Creative Execution:
To identify the best social media platforms, which resonate with the current target audience (College Students), we, as marketers, have to consider the following:
- Shifts in consumer purchase behaviour
- Different ways millennial shoppers consume information
- Behavioural, physiographic landscape
- The need of customization and personalization within the segment
Based on the conducted analysis, we can identify major platforms, which help to increase awareness of the mental health within the target market.
1. Instagram
This photo-heavy social media platform is focused on 18-34 aged people. “Instagram is largely made up of urban, youthful demographics, with a significant skew toward women.” (Business Insider). The uploaded pictures and videos (with #YellowIsForHello hashtag), will generate a buzz and force people to share their opinion about this topic. It will help The Friendship Bench to gain valuable customer insights and build future marketing strategies on top of the analyzed data. Other features to consider, while targeting to the students on Instagram:
- Use geo-location to target to specific areas
- Tag social influencers and/or real customers to build long-term relationships with them. (It encourages the customers to become brand ambassadors and motivate them to share their personal stories).
Rationale:
- Instagram is about quality not quantity. Instagram accounts for 7% of daily photo uploads among the top four photo-sharing platforms (544 million daily uploads total). So it's not as much of a heavyweight, in volume terms, as some might believe.
- Early data shows that Instagram video attracts more engagement than Instagram competitor, Vine.
- Similar to Pinterest, another photo-heavy platform, Instagram skews heavily toward women; 68% of its users are female, according to Appdata.
2. Snapchat
Snapchat’s Discover feature is a great opportunity to consider while targeting to the millennial audience. This feature helps to collect pictures, audio, video, web pages, etc. Users can look through the updated daily news/trends and learn about what is happening on a particular day. Snapchat’s discover feature is available for its primary media partners. The Friendship Bench can use them as an indirect channel to reach the end-users. Such partners as VICE Media, BuzzFeed and Mashable can become advocates and social influencers. If the Friendship Bench targets through them, it will create the very strong resonance with its consumers.
Rationale: “Snapchat is positioning itself more fully as a media platform — one that reaches an estimated 100 million-plus monthly active users. Snapchat Discover will compete with other social platforms and services that encompass video, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.” (Todd Spangler)
