WHAT IS MISTAG ?

We interview people all around the world who talk about themselves and their experience with mental illness. Some have recovered, some have not, but all want to break the silence and the stigma surrounding mental illness. We show mental illnesses experiences can happen to anyone regardless of nationality, religion, skin color, gender, money etc.

MISTAG’s 3 main goals

1. Help people going through a mental illness experience to feel less lonely, understood. To know that this can happens to everyone, of all ages, religions, continents and that there is no reason to be ashamed of it. Now, there are MISTAG faces from all around the world so there will always be someone to look up to or to see ourselves in.

2. Help families, friends and anyone who haven’t experienced it to better understand what is happening to their child, friend etc., and to receive some advice from people who have lived / are having these experiences.

3. Improve the knowledge of students in psychology, psychiatry and health professionals so they learn about the influence of culture on the patient’s experience. This will help to avoid misdiagnosis and allow the professional to use the strengths of the person’s culture and community in their recovery path.

We believe breaking the stigma means to touch both people living with a mental illness experience and people who have never experienced it.

In MISTAG, each person interviewed has a different message, a different experience and might speak a different language (but all interviews are subtitled in English). During the interviews, the questions are not only about the experience itself or the downsides of it. We also ask questions about the person, who they are, what they like… Because too often when we talk about mental health, we completely forget the whole person.

The project is also called MISTAG for that: from the word stigma, meaning that we are given a label (mistagged) when we have a mental health diagnosis and we forget the beautiful complexity of the personality of each individual.