Symptoms for most mental illnesses begin during the teen years. Yet there is a huge barrier to assessing mental illness because of social stigma. The Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health needed a website to help parents, teens, educators and health professionals identify and support teens with mental illness. The goal, to keep young lives on track.
Teens are a difficult group to connect with. They are exploring their independence, and trying to understand who they are in the world.
Many teenagers and parents are too frightened to ask for help when symptoms first appear. They're afraid. They don't know a lot about mental illness and they're very concerned about stigma or being judged unfairly.
The approach to the website was to create a comfortable and non-threatening environment - one where teens could see themselves. The site also applies web 2.0 tools to harness the power of social marketing to raise awareness of adolescent mental health issues.
Impact, in collaboration with the Chair, took a complex subject matter and developed an inviting, yet state-of-the-art website. The site features photos of real youth with real lives and real mental health issues. The resulting message: it's okay to talk about mental health.
The award-winning www.teenmentalhealth.org has succeeded in building an online community of health professionals, educators and partners, while still providing teens and families with access to scientifically-validated resources. Its web 2.0 design provides social marketing tools that are combined with edit-in-place CMS technology.
The site goes beyond the initial goal of being a leading source of information and has over 1,000 subscribers to the blog. This site also supports the sharing of application-ready training programs, tools and resources.
"I found this site while searching for an article about Depression. I bookmarked and I check it all the time. Love this site, keep posting." - Jon Kabat Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School
Silver Winner of 2009 Web Health Awards and a Jasper Award of Excellence from Canadian Public Relations Society -NS
