Bring Change 2 Mind

Brooke Coupal

Professor Zimdars

Advanced Mass Communication

May 9, 2016

Bring Change 2 Mind Activism through Social Media

            Mental illness plagues numerous people in the world.  In 2008 it was estimated that 26 percent of adult Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder (Meyers, 2013, 634).  With this being a little over a quarter of the adult population in America, this is an illness that is very prominent.  Even with its prominence, mental illness has a stigma attached to it.  Stigma behind mental illness can be detrimental to society, as those suffering choose not to seek out help due to their embarrassment of their disorder.  Thankfully there are activist groups that try to end the stigma behind mental illness.  One of these activist groups is entitled Bring Change 2 Mind (BC2M).  Their mission statement is “to end stigma and discrimination surrounding mental illness” (BC2M, 2016).   BC2M tries to reach their goal of ending stigma of mental health through various social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook,.

            BC2M was created by Glenn Close when she found out that many of her family members were affected by mental health illnesses (BC2M, 2016).  In an interview with ABC News (2015), Close explains how her 50-year old sister came up to here and told her that she could not stop thinking about killing herself.  This came as a surprise for Close since her family never discussed mental illness, never mind the possibility of it running in the family.  For 50 years, Close’s sister suffered from bipolar disorder, but was never properly diagnosed.  Close believes this is because of the stigma attached with mental illness.  Her sister never reached out for help before, until she felt that death was the only option.  The stereotypes that go along with mental illness make people fearful to ask for help because they do not want to be a part of these negative stereotypes; they just want to be normal.  Due to this, Close started BC2M in 2010 to help start the conversation on mental illness (ABC News, 2015). 

            BC2M’s main goal is to open conversation on mental illness.  Close feels that it is important to talk about the various illnesses so people realize that it is okay to have a mental illness.  That there are many others suffering too, and it is nothing to be embarrassed about and that it is okay to ask for help (ABC News, 2015).  BC2M gets their message out through many social media platforms.  According to Valenzuela (2013), the reason for using social media platforms for activism is to get more people to join the cause.  Users would otherwise be disengaged towards various causes if it was for social media.  Social media helps to bring awareness to the different causes due to the activeness of people being online.  The use of social media, however, can bring upon “slacktivism,” in which personal satisfaction is created by people supporting and following these activist social media accounts, but not actually doing anything further with them.  This in turn results in social media not being effective when trying to promote activism.  BC2M social media does not promote slacktivism, as they appropriately use each social media platform towards their goal of ending the stigma on mental health.

            The first social media platform that BC2M uses is Twitter.  According to Aksay et al. (2007), Twitter is used for microblogging.  Microblogging is the form of writing brief text updates to be posted for others to read.  This provides a “light-weight easy form of communication that enables users to broadcast and share information about their activities, opinions, and status” (Aksay et al., 2007).  BC2M’s twitter (https://twitter.com/BC2M/) uses Twitter in just that way to get their information across.  The messages here are kept short in order to engage the attention of the followers.  The posts consist of quotes such as “You’re not alone. Be the change” and “Don’t let stigma silence you.”  They also use the retweet function to retweet different celebrities and other activist groups that post about mental illness and ending the stigma behind it.  Finally, their posts also consist of short facts which help to end the myths of mental health.  One of these tweets stated “67% of women with a #mentalillness have been told to ‘snap out of it.’”  Through the use of short messages, the organization is able to get their point across in an efficient manner.  They are able to teach their followers facts about mental illness as well as send inspiring quotes to those suffering.  Retweeting is also beneficial because it shows that others are supportive of ending stigma, and in return others can retweet BC2M to help spread the message further.

            Another form of social media that BC2M uses in Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/bringchange2mind/).  According to Hu et al. (2014), Instagram is the most popular photo capturing and sharing application.  BC2M uses this statistic in order to get more attraction with their photos and stories that they post.  This account is strictly to have people share their stories of mental health.  This matches with their goal to open conversation on mental health in a way so others feel comfortable talking about it.  The account posts portraits of people who have sent in and shared their story.  Within the caption of the photo is their whole story for followers to read.  The way that they receive these stories is by encouraging people to share their stories on their personal Instagram accounts and then tagging @bringchange2mind within their post.  Through this BC2M can see this posting, and they use an application to repost the story onto their page.  This is beneficial because not only is the word getting out on their own account, but also on the accounts of many individuals.  This helps to spread awareness and to open conversation on mental health.

            A third social media account that they frequently utilize is Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/BringChange2Mind/).  According to Joinson (2008), Facebook is used to upload and facilitate content in various forms such as text, photos, and videos.  This also garners for opportunities of communication through comments and shares.  Here BC2M combines what they do on Twitter and Instagram.  They share facts and positive messages, just like Twitter, as well as personal stories to open conversations, just as Instagram.  The difference here, however, is they are able to post many more words than they would be able to on Twitter, as well as post more photos and videos at one time than they would on Instagram.  On Facebook BC2M posts way more videos than they do on Twitter or Instagram.  They often post videos that they created themselves that inform the public on mental health.  These videos can then easily be shared by others onto their own personal Facebooks, which allows for more eyes to watch them.  Overall, their Facebook account allows for the most information to be spread through the lengthy posts and videos.

            BC2M successfully gets their word across through the three social media platforms.  This is shown through the amount of followers they have on each one: Twitter (33.1K), Instagram (7,416), and Facebook (91K).  They affectively use each social media platform to its benefit, giving short facts and inspiring quotes on Twitter, photos and stories on Instagram, and lengthier posts and videos on Facebook.  Social media is also beneficial to their activism as it does not involve slacktivism.  This is because followers are actively sharing their stories and sharing the information that BC2M puts out.  This is the goal of BC2M is to open conversation on mental illness, and they successfully are doing so as they gain followers and followers share their stories.  Through this BC2M is able to help end the stigma behind mental health illness by spreading the word on it.

References

ABC News. (2015). Glenn Close on ending mental illness stigma. ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/glenn-close-ending-mental-illness-stigma-34991681

Bring Change 2 Mind (2016). Bring Change 2 Mind. Retrieved from http://bringchange2mind.org/

Hu, Y., Manikonda, L., & Kambhampati, S. (2014, June). What We Instagram: A First Analysis of Instagram Photo Content and User Types. InICWSM.

Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., & Tseng, B. (2007, August). Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis (pp. 56-65). ACM.

Joinson, A. N. (2008, April). Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people?: motives and use of facebook. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1027-1036). ACM.

Meyers, D.G. (2013). Psychology tenth edition in modules. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.

Valenzuela, S. (2013). Unpacking the use of social media for protest behavior the roles of information, opinion expression, and activism.American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), 920-942.