What's Up With Alex (WUWA)? Animated Storytelling for Mental Health Literacy Among Young People

This collaborative study will examine whether animated stories produced by Aardman Animations can assist young people in building awareness of and responding to mental health challenges. Typically, young people face multiple and significant barriers regarding their mental health. They may be unaware that they need help in the first place or where to access support. While such an audience may be emotionally intelligent, they can lack both the mental health literacy and finances to access timely help - something highly valued when facing very stressful periods, for example, around examination times. It is at such points that young people struggle to allocate time to seek support.
Our central question is: Can co-created, animated stories and companion app increase young people's mental health literacy?
This study adds a new dimension to the portfolio of health humanities projects supported by the AHRC, aligning strongly with and bridging two streams in its new Strategic Development Plan: a) in supporting research on mental health as an interdisciplinary contemporary challenge; and b) addressing how arts and humanities research can support creativity and the creative economy. In so doing, it brings together expertise in world-beating animation, health and the arts and humanities alongside a scientific, social and behavioural evaluative layer that seeks to advance transformative impacts in policy, provision and practice relevant to statutory and third sector organisations supporting mental health literacy among young people.
Our chief partner, Aardman, have a stellar history in film animation, winning numerous major awards and nominations including Academy Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTA Awards, Annie Awards and many others. Aardman has prided itself on creating short films on mental health to advance literacy, not least 'Share the Orange' (Alzheimers Research UK), 'Bristol Ageing Better' (Isolation and Loneliness) and, most recently, 'New Mindset', narrated by Stephen Fry. This proposed programme of work will strengthen a grand ambition at Aardman for advancing mental health literacy through animated storytelling.
Telling stories are as much part of us as breathing air. Indeed we are storytelling animals. Stories are key in helping us understand our environment, our experiences and relationships. They help us build and convey our identities, the building blocks of our selves. Furthermore, in a complex, uncertain, changing and seemingly contradictory world, stories are uniquely suited for helping us to navigate our way through it. There is growing interest in how stories and metaphor are core to life and can help people negotiate mental health. Importantly, stories can also interrogate, challenge and transform existing power relationships, including those that predominate within healthcare contexts.
Creative practices in the arts and humanities have the potential for transforming people's mental health. In fact, we can view creative resources from the arts and humanities as constituting a kind of additional or shadow health service. However, there is little in the way of research evidence for animated stories and mental health literacy. We need much clearer and robust evidence of potential impact on young people. With a growing burden of mental distress on young people combined with rising costs for the delivery of services, it is timely to investigate how animated stories could play their part in advancing mental health literacy among young people and helping them find ways to deal with life's challenges.

This project has a potentially wide impact on public engagement and academic research. The principal beneficiaries of these impacts may be divided into three key groups:
1. Policy-makers: The project is designed to bring together a major animation company (Aardman), arts and humanities scholars, young people, service user/ PPI representatives, health, social care and education personnel, to respond to contemporary anxieties about mental health literacy among young people in the UK. As such, it is anticipated that research findings generated by the project may stimulate and inform mental health debate, particularly as it relates to the development of policies advancing less-centralised resources for enhancing mental health literacy and the maintenance and recovery of mental health and well-being. The inquiry will contribute to debates about broader questions concerning the role of creative approaches to public mental health.
2. Health, social care and education personnel: The project will also be of interest to health, social care, education, community arts personnel involved in mental health work with young people and the promotion of mental health literacy. The interdisciplinary subject matter and methodology of the project aligns it with the emergent field of health humanities, in this case through a combination of film animation, storytelling/narrative, psychology, language and public health. In particular, it will afford knowledge dissemination benefits with regard to the ways in which these fields inter-animate one another. It is hoped that the research findings may ultimately inform mental health literacy practices for young people relevant to Public Health England, NHS, private health, social care, education and community-based initiatives and, potentially, suggest increased effectiveness of public health approaches to reducing mental health difficulties and advancing peer education and support for young people adjusting to life's challenges.
3. The public: We envisage potential social benefits for young people with mental health difficulties most of whom will not be receiving statutory help or support during the period of funding, these emanating primarily from its impacts on public awareness and understanding of issues pertaining to mental health literacy. In particular, it is envisaged that the project will stimulate and inform wider societal discussions of topics including the respective responsibilities of different communities for the preservation of health and treatment of mental health; the benefits of shared creative activity among young people working on the project; generate public contribution to debate about ways to tackle the challenges faced by young people; informing attitudes to and/or beliefs about the feasibility of creative public health as a possible solution to the failure of biomedical and psychiatric approaches to date to address the mental health of young people; and empowering young people individually and collectively to deploy greater agency in their own mental health and well-being.
In addition, by engaging arts and humanities scholars and the creative personnel of Aardman with issues of contemporary mental health literacy among young people the project will stimulate discussion and debate about new kinds of creative public health enterprise in the future. In so doing it is hoped that the project will produce important social benefits in enhancing public understanding of new approaches to young people and their mental health and well-being needs, effecting positive changes in policy, organisational, practitioner, public behaviour.