FMP Statement of Intent
Anxiety Web is a personal exploration of my struggle with mental health whilst being at university. Through research, I realised that the future of tackling mental health in society is by teaching ourselves and others to look after our mental wellbeing in the first place. By sharing experiences, you can help to further educate people to look out for similar signs of struggle in themselves as well as others.
In my personal experience communicating how I felt with words was incredibly hard, I therefore wanted to create an outcome that communicated my experience with anxiety and depression visually.
I began mapping out the past 5 years that Iāve been a university to try and pin point what factors effected my mental health and how I dealt with it at that particular time. I did this by creating a time scale to measure each year by. This was done through looking at photos on my phone, social media posts, emails and bank statements. By looking at photos from the past I was also able to recall memories from that particular time which helped in the process to navigating and organising my data later on.
After filtering my data, I eventually was able to create a set of spider diagrams communicating different factors that I believe affected my mental health as a student. Money worry put pressure on me to work more, affecting my studies, and slowly I fell further and further behind. In return, my self-esteem suffered, and communication became more difficult with friends, parents, work and uni.
To communicate this visually I wanted to create an outcome that was physical. I decided to use wood, nails and string to bring the data to life. My reason for creating a physical outcome was when looking at mental health online, graphs used in articles began to look very clinical, I wanted to communicate my data in a more intriguing visual outcome to not only show the data but to also capture how I personally felt with anxiety and depression. The use of black wood was to represent my depression and the coloured string, when all placed together represents how my anxiety felt, with erratic thoughts all over the place with constant worry and stress.
Throughout my FMP process, Iāve been able to understand my own mental health a lot clearer. My outcome has allowed me to finally communicate how I felt in a way that doesnāt require me to use a lot of words. Although this is my own experience, I have met lots of other students who have also been through similar struggles. My intention for the outcome is so people will either resonate with the data or learn from the mistakes I made by neglecting my mental wellbeing, and to look out for any signs from their family, friends or even themselves in the future. Ā