Dear Moi: Conversation Cards for People of Color Around Mental Health
Dear Moi allows a safe space for unspoken conversation about mental health. It is known that brown and black communities have a lack of interest towards mental health care due to deep rooted fear that our society has pushed upon minorities.
Candice Sophia Antoine
Michael Sainato & Ammar Belal
KEYWORDS
Project
Dear Moi, conversation cards breaking the barrier of stigma towards mental health in black communities by engaging safe and meaningful dialogue with self or friends through questions and prompts. If you are in therapy, it is also a great tool to use with your therapist to guide your sessions. Most importantly, it is not about replacing therapy but allowing perspective, growth, and self-exploration. Through my research and interviews, I was able to gather frequent topic such as medical racism, cultural appropriation, lack of insurance acceptance for therapy, ancestral PTSD- which helped me built my questions and prompts for my cards.
challenge
After my research, I knew that therapy wasn’t an option for everybody so for me it was challenging to offer an alternative that I felt was beneficial to my audience. I knew I had to craft my questions and prompts with care and back them up with proper sources. It took me a lot of time to figure out the content of my cards, therefore I spent little time testing my card to get honest feedback. I believe that getting feedback early on, even with less content would allow me to improve my cards in general.
Outcome
Knowing that some individuals don’t even realize that part of growth and healing is talking was my motivation when creating Dear Moi. It was all about learning more about overlooked topic and share some of their thoughts and experience with close friends or for their personal journey. I learned a lot during the process of this project, and I would be happy to continue working on it post-graduation. Once, I have enough feedback, then I will be able to refine my work and print my final set of cards and maybe share a few to the world.
