Stigma Of Mental Health

All of the components are based on a number of theories we have researched from our health communication class. The first theory we integrated into our campaign is the commitment-trust theory of relationships. This a marketing theory where people make choices and judgements based on trust, shared values, loyalty, and commitment. The biggest predictors of relationship strengths is trust and commitment. Once the relationship is established many benefits can follow, such as uncertainty reduction, sense of stability, and enhanced identity. The takeaway of this theory is by gaining trust through shared values we can establish a relationship that enables either person to have an influence on another. We based our awareness video ad on this theory.
This approach demonstrates that health is not merely the result of individual choices, but is mixed with issues of culture, power, control, identity, and social consciousness. Health is socially constructed and enacted by the cultures we are surrounded by. This social context allows us to decide what is healthy, good, and acceptable. With this campaign on mental health, we want to bring awareness and make information available. Through, social media we can show how important our campaign is. We can use our campaign to normalize mental illness and show that mental health is an issue that pertains to everyone. By making mental health more socially and culturally acceptable, we can be the first step to erasing the stigma of mental illness. The stigma of mental health has become a barrier to care. There are models to display this; these models typically conceptualize care seeking as “a process that is influenced by social and cultural factors and one that involves symptom appraisal (for example, perceiving a need for mental health help) as well as acting on that appraisal ( 7 , 8). Empirical research supports these models, documenting that attitudes and beliefs about mental health and treatment have significant influences on help-seeking behavior, even after the severity of symptoms are controlled for” ( 9 ). We must make seeking for help culturally acceptable to people can start demonstrating more help-seeking behaviors, which
This states that “people are influenced by social norms to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how much they value the social approval to be gained by conforming.” We judge our opinion of others and even ourselves by what is socially relevant. With the world today becoming more and more dependent on social media as an access to information, this is where we focused a lot of our campaign components. Many people today choose what news articles or videos they are watching based on what their friends are posting. Less and less people are seeking out information and instead letting the information come to them through social media. Our hug challenge and awareness video can help reach many people through this social media