‘I am’ is the latest film from UBTV’s features department which explores the topic of depression at university.
After the success of our previous videos, including ‘Bristol Strangers Kissing’, we decided to take on a more serious topic for our next video. Mental illness is such a prevalent issue in society, not least with students, and we all felt that it just wasn’t spoken about enough. The statistics for depression speak for themselves and prove that this is a subject that we need to be acknowledging and discussing rather than ignoring. Depression and anxiety are particularly common for students, and everyone involved in making the film knew of at least one person who had gone through it. Therefore, we made this raw, hard-hitting video as a way to raise awareness of mental illnesses in the student community. We used an actor, Heidi Hunwick-Brown, to give an internal monologue of some of the thoughts that depression sufferers might be having. We chose specifically to not add any music to the video as we wanted to give it the air of reality and rawness that it deserved as this seemed most appropriate for the subject matter. As it says in the video, although mental illness is not necessarily a visual one, it is still something that can be treated. Therefore, with this video we hope to not only raise awareness but also encourage those who might be suffering with depression or anxiety, for example, to not be afraid to get help. Mental illness should not be something to be ashamed of. No one is embarrassed to seek help when they have a physical illness and it shouldn’t be any different with mental illness either. So, we are encouraging everyone to please watch and share the video in order to spread this message and raise awareness.