In Holland, one out of four persons suffers from mental illness. It is a complicated taboo, which affects the lives of not only the patients but also their loved ones, relatives and colleagues. The objective of the campaign was not only to make the people aware of this enormous problem, but to make them change their behaviour as well. We wanted to get people to make contact with the people who suffer from their illness, and who often live in social isolation as this will help their healing process. We needed to mobilize all media, traditional and social in order to get the message across.

But the campaign (completely developed for free) had no budget, everything had to be earned.

An enormous challenge therefore, is the task to make people actually change their behaviour.

In order to get national attention, we called for a unique press conference where the results from our research was presented. The press conference was attended by national and regional TV and all major national newspapers. During the event we not only presented the research, but next to academic speakers, also mentally ill patients themselves gave testimony of what had happened in their lives since they fell ill and the social isolation they had to endure as a result of their illness. Naturally there were press kits and other promo material.

The campaign had an enormous impact, with hundreds of newspaper articles and numerous TV items in various popular TV shows. It enabled mentally ill patients to finally share their stories with millions of people, breaking the silence surrounding this great taboo.

More than 76% of the Dutch population claimed to have seen the very well-liked campaign. But more importantly: 17% took ‘some form‘ of action and 7% actually discussed the problem with a mentally ill person, leading to over 650,000 discussions between the 2 groups.

Due to this success the helpline is continued by Korrelatie, the country’s leading mental health organization.