Research often uncovers life-changing information. The challenge of any educational resource is to find a way to frame those discoveries in a way that makes them accessible and attractive to audiences.

The Links project required us to project manage, design and build a complex website, graphic and video content that would do just that.

A review of the research findings saw us divide the content into what would be communicated best through each medium. Video is the most powerful tool available to communicate emotive stories, so we designed films around the big, emotionally charged topics. Text, graphics and were used to deliver the details and examples.

There is still great stigma around mental illness (and in particular depression and bipolar disorder). With the videos, we decided to level the playing field visually. We shot a series of interviews with both experts and people living with depression, but without identifying who was who. Ethics and privacy issues also required us to work with actors rather than film interviews with ‘real people living with depression’. We supplied actors with character briefs and some specific information about depression based upon a collection of real stories and experiences. The actors were then interviewed about their ‘experience’ with depression. Experts and researchers sat in on these interviews to assure the information delivered by actors were accurate. Following this, we interviewed experts to discuss their views on depression, bi-polar disorder and the myths associated with the issue.

Good Eye Deer branded and then developed the interactive educational website and video content for this project – our second of three for PRG (See our 3 Steps to Telehealth online resource produced in 2013). The Psychosocial Research Group (PRG) provided the research and copy. NeuRa now hosts the site.