Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA)’s campaign Pop the Stigma ran for its fifth consecutive year at Carleton this October.
The campaign, which was expanded this year to last a month instead of a week like previous years, aims to spread awareness of mental health struggles and disabilities. Pop the Stigma included events such as therapy dogs, a SafeTalk workshop, a paint night, and a resource fair.
“It’s good to have a month-long [campaign] and we’re seeing a lot of students coming and it’s not the same faces which is also good,” said Sissi De Flaviis, CUSA vice-president (student issues), who was in charge of running the campaign.
“Obviously the people that show up to our events are most likely our friends because they’re more likely to see it on our social medias,” De Flaviis added.
To combat advertising to a small group of friends, De Flaviis said she has been partnering with service centres more this year to help reach a wider audience.
Although making the events more spread out has made them more accessible for students’ busy schedules, De Flaviis said she isn’t sure they have really noticed the difference.
“I’m not sure if students have noticed that it’s a month-long instead of a week-long,” she said. “But people are like ‘Oh, I see it all the time now,’ which I think is the impact of the month-long event.”
De Flaviis said her focus for the event was to make sure students knew they weren’t alone.
“I just still think people feel kinda lonely when they’re going through this,” De Flaviis said. “So hopefully this month, when they saw yellow and they saw other people talking about it, they didn’t feel they were by themselves.”
“I think when we kind of have even more events and spread them out even more, it kind of creates a greater awareness,” Bennett said. “You see one event at the beginning of the month and you’re like ‘Oh my god, I definitely have to try this later in the month.’”
When asked about the campaign’s significance, Bennett said Pop the Stigma provides an important platform to discuss disabilities, which can sometimes be overlooked.
“The reality is that there’s a super high percentage of people with disabilities that also face mental illness and mental health struggles,” she said. “If we’re able to kind of create more awareness about that in particular, that would be awesome.”
The stigma surrounding physical disabilities is still very high, according to Kaitlin Havens, a first-year history and communication student who lives with a physical disability.
“Even if you just have like a physical disability, there’s some sort of internal association people have that you’re either stupid or you can’t do things,” Havens said. “So it would be nice to just kind of get the information out there and open up opportunities for people to get to know the people behind the disability.”
Havens also said Pop the Stigma’s method of raising awareness is effective because it is fun.
“It’s like when your parents tell you that you’re eating some sort of candy but it’s actually a vegetable,” she said. “It’s something sort of like that, you’re sneaking it in and they don’t even notice that they’re becoming more open-minded and accepting of it.”
De Flaviis said she hopes Pop the Stigma will continue to run a month-long next year.
“I think I’m gonna kind of emphasize to the next VPSI that it is important to continue the new month-long tradition because we changed it for a reason,” she said. “So yes, it is a little bit more effort, but we are seeing the results in students.”
Featured image by Spencer Colby.
