New campaign aims to highlight mental health issues

Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events. A new campaign launching today is aiming to highlight mental health issues faced in a variety of industries. The campaign We Bounce Back produced by mental health charity Voices of Hope, involves a series of video interviews featuring musician Melodownz, small business owners Grace & Shenine from Doe Donuts, university student and childhood cancer survivor Lucy Sharp, construction worker Will, sports players Alex & Bailey and Mai FM radio announcer Tegan Yorwarth who all speak candidly about the challenges they’ve faced with their mental health while touching on resilience and the impact of a pandemic.

“We hope this campaign will show that no matter who you are or what your life circumstances are, we all face mental health challenges that we can get through and you do not have to go through them alone. Having different people from a variety of backgrounds talk openly about their experiences will hopefully help open up and encourage ongoing dialogue around the subject” says spokesperson Genevieve Mora.

“The more that mental health is seen as less of a taboo subject and spoken openly and responsibly about, the more we can move to break the lingering stigma and continue advocating for better mental health outcomes especially considering how bad our current mental health statistics are.”

Voices of Hope regularly receives messages from schools, students and teachers wanting to incorporate conversations about mental health in an education setting. After doing a sample survey of over 100 teachers across New Zealand to understand what could be useful to education professionals, We Bounce Back’s campaign content will be released alongside a resource kit produced for schools to utilise and assist with furthering mental health awareness.

Voices of Hope’s We Bounce Back campaign has been supported through a grant from the Sutherland Self Help Trust. Voices of Hope are grateful for them for believing in their vision. Their support enabled these stories to be shared which ultimately will help combat the stigma.

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