Case Study

Having been at the University of Minnesota Duluth for the past three and a half years, I have been given my better share of projects to create in classes. I feel that I’m most inspired when I get to create something revolving around mental health. My favorite so far was a project I worked on this fall semester. We were assigned to create a company that is needed, especially during the current pandemic. Not only were we supposed to come up with a company, we had to make the branding manual as well.

I decided to go with a non-profit organization. I wanted to make something that I found helpful, or at least would have found it helpful. I came up with the idea of an organization for mental health education, specifically targeted towards young teens. This is because most people who end up having mental illnesses, tend to develop more severe symptoms. This would give teens the knowledge and tools they need before they are typically developing symptoms. As well as exposing people to having more knowledge on mental illnesses and hopefully make mental health seem a “less taboo” topic.

I decided on the name PsychED, for a couple reasons. First being the psych in psychological and ED as in education. As well as the slang of Psyched meaning excited about something. I wanted to be able to connect with teens rather than create another “boring educational organization”. In order to do this I came up with the idea to have characters with specific traits that they can relate to. So I came up with the “Emotion Monsters” each having distinct traits and how they react to stressful situations. I wish that this was an actual organization, because I feel that it would be extremely helpful for teens as well as later transitioning into adulthood. However, I had a lot of fun working on this project and really enjoyed coming up with these for monsters and creating their personalities.