Mind, the mental health charity, asked a team of five of us to design an intervention based either around community or the home. We decided to look at the language used to describe or talk about Anxiety and to question quantifiable statistics and the relationship they have with mental health.
To collect the language around anxiety we decided to put boxes which allow anonymous self expression about anxiety from members of the public in Hackney- the base of our operations after contacting Hackney Mind and receiving their help.
After a few days we collected the boxes and revealed the results, there was a wealth of data provided, ranging from poetic to the silly. All of it very useful and exciting.
We had also gathered language online from forums and websites about anxiety, we used these words to create this video which randomly assorts the words periodically creating an anxiety poem generator.
I wanted to find a better use for the words we had collected in Hackney, I also felt the anxiety poem generator was half finished. Therefore I added a soundtrack that used words generated by the people of Hackney, watch here.
Alongside this we had set about ethnographic research of Hackney, the aim was to look at Hackney as if it were a human being. We used a mixture of statistics found from external sources and our own quirkier statistics. We began taking information like the amount of chewing gum on the floor and using that to make assumptions and judgements of how happy or sad Hackney was.
Watch the video here
This film was both obsessed and repulsed by the relationship mental health care has with statistics.