College life has its ups and downs and, at Centennial College, we recognize mental health issues are a growing concern for students. That’s why the college offers a wealth of resources to help distressed students. To connect you with those resources, we’ve launched Storyvoice, a special project where you can express your own relationship with mental health.
Storyvoice is an initiative where students can engage in a dialogue about mental health through art, while also providing ways to find help with mental health issues. It’s a platform on the college’s website that hosts student-created artwork about their personal mental health experience. Each individual Storyvoice page contains a work of art, along with an artist’s statement and links to mental health resources. While there’s already an extensive selection of art for perusal, there’s room for students to keep submitting works of art. Ultimately, the goal is to create a place where students can listen, be heard and get directed to any help they might need.
Art with a mission
“Students would express to me, or my colleagues, serious anxiety issues and mental health concerns, but were unaware that their student fees covered access to in-person counselling at the college,” says Anthony Harrison, Fine Arts Studio faculty and project lead on Storyvoice. “Some would not go, because of stigma and reluctance to communicate about it. So how about creating something where we’re already talking about it?”
The intent is for students to engage with the art, consider it, but also visit the links that each page points to. Those Centennial College resources include the Centre for Accessible Learning and Counselling Services (CALCS), Centennial Talks, and Wellness Wednesdays. The project isn’t just about promoting the College’s mental health resources, either; each page links to a list of mental health resources that are found in the community.
Storyvoice is also tied into a research project from the college’s Applied Research and Innovation Fund (ARIF.) It anonymously tracks web traffic to the Storyvoice page to see if visitors experiencing the story visit the links, and which links they visit, to make sure that the art is helping direct the audience to the help they might need.
Share your voice
Beyond the website, the Storyvoice banner painting, “Feeling blue,” by Avery Lawrance, will be on display at the Story Arts Centre, with potential for more physical artworks to be displayed in the future. There’s also more student-submitted material coming to the webpage itself, which you can keep up with by subscribing to Storyvoice’s Newsletter. But beyond that, if you’ve got something to say, they’re ready to listen, as any Centennial College student is invited to submit artwork of their own, in any form, be it visual, written, spoken word, video or audio submissions.
“Any student can submit their work,” Anthony says. “It doesn’t even have to be within their program discipline. It just has to be themed around mental health issues. People can express things from any sincere perspective. We go through every submission, and we anticipate that some of the work will be potentially challenging to consume.”
“I’m impressed by the courage and the candor of what’s been shown already,” he adds.