Making banners with young people impacted by the youth mental health crisis
Last year I got chatting to young activists and campaigners from Mad Youth Organise, a campaign run by Just Treatment. MYO is a campaign led by and for young people with lived experience of mental illness.
Our starting point was simple: the mental health crisis is not just happening inside people’s heads, it’s happening in a society that makes it hard to survive. MYO name the forces driving that distress: poverty, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and the wider precarity of our lives.
MYO believe that care is political. That healing comes not only through treatment or services, but through community, safety, housing, fair work, and solidarity.
Through art, protest, and collective care, we’re imagining a world where all young people can live with dignity, and where care is not a privilege, but a shared responsibility.
We decided to create a series of banners together that would represent the feelings of the campaigners and speak to their specific aims around bringing Big Tech to account. As I write, there have been key rulings in the US that I hope will become a watershed moment for this movement towards justice.
For this collaboration we began with a simple hand stitching session in order to give us time to mulch over ideas and plan what we wanted our bigger banners to look like. In the same week, the UK government had announced severe cuts to disability allowance benefits such as the Personal Independence Payment, which would deeply affect many members of the group.
We stitched our thoughts and feelings into delicately embroidered brains. Each brain highlighted where the participant was at, but more importantly, doing something with our hands gave the group the time and space they needed to process what they were feeling, talking as little or as much as they wished.
Over a series of four sessions we then went on to design the bigger banners which would be used in protests and actions across the UK. The young people came up with a collaborative design showcasing the name of the campaign. They also created a more detailed design based on a phone screen calling out Big Tech in iridescent silver letters, as well as a ‘No Wonder We Are Mad’ message bordered with checkerboard tiles inspired by the the interior walls of mental health institutions.
We split up into small teams to stitch each section, then came together to assemble the banners into big statement pieces that could be read from afar. We first used the banners for a protest outside the Treasury in London, calling for greater taxes on the rich. To find out more about this project, check out this short film:
We would like to say thank you to the Bertha Foundation Artivism Awards for funding these workshops, making them free to access for the young people involved.
We are planning to make an online version of our in person Intro To Sewing Banners workshop so that anyone, no matter where you are based, can pick up the skills you need to make visually impactful banners. We will be offering community pricing for this online workshop. If you would like to find out more when it is announced, let us know your email below.
