What I Learned from #BellLetsTalk

Let me just say it straight up- Bell’s Let’s Talk Day was amazing. While there were some people overly focused on the money (including Bell themselves), overall, I was astounded by what was appearing in my Twitter feed.

There were so many tweets about mental health and mental illness. Tweets sharing facts, figures, organizations helping out. Tweets from people telling their stories, their perspectives, and their pleas. Tweets from people encouraging everyone to take care of themselves, and letting people know they are always there to help if need be.

What I enjoyed even more than just the tweets themselves was the sense of community that grew. I had tweets retweeted and favourited by people all over the country, people I’ve never met and never talked to before. I was retweeting retweets of tweets from people I didn’t know- I just liked what they had to say. And I had conversations with people about topics that I care about, all based off 140 characters they had tweeted. That was pretty spectacular.

Normalizing the conversation

One thing that I ended up loving was actually something I started off hating. A lot of people were inserting #BellLetsTalk into every tweet they sent, even if it had nothing to do with mental health or Let’s Talk Day. To me, this made it all about the money, and not about the cause . But then this tweet appeared in my timeline:

https://twitter.com/marishafp/status/428242204881330176

And damn it, Marisha was right. It was actually pretty cool that everyone was willing to insert this conversation into their everyday tweets. Now if only we can get them to insert it into their everyday life too, every day.

So many people cared

The best part about #BellLetsTalk day was seeing how many people care about the issue, and want  things to be different. Tweets were coming from all directions, and from all types of people. It became clear that there are a lot of people out there who do recognize that mental health is an issue, and who do want to see things change.

This also raised a question for me- if there are so many people out there who recognize the issue and want to see things change, why is change still happening so slowly? Sometimes I wonder if many of our mental health campaigns are mis-directing their efforts- but I’ll leave that thought for a future post!

Until then- keep tweeting, keep talking, and keep fighting for that change!

Did you participate in #BellLetsTalk day? What did you enjoy about the event? Share in the comments!

Featured image by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Nicole Crozier

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