An exam is announced. Heartbeats echo in your seat. You put on a warm, heavy jacket. Its weight suffocates you. The voice of a teenager resonates: she thinks she is going to die. You feel everything about his panic attack. This is the objective of the EpiSens immersive experience: to immerse visitors in the heart of mental health disorders.
Presented at the Saint-Hyacinthe library until November 10, before being accessible elsewhere in Quebec, the experience allows you to experience anxiety, schizophrenia, depression and bipolarity from the inside.
“Experiencing the symptoms associated with different mental health disorders can reduce false negative beliefs,” explains Guylaine Moore, general director of the Richelieu-Yamaska Psychosocial Center, who designed the project with the integrated health and social services center from Montérégie-Est, CREO, a digital creation and scientific communication company, and Marjorie Montreuil, researcher at McGill University.
EpiSens is a response to the many awareness campaigns that do not work, as demonstrated by numerous studies, says Guylaine Moore. “On the other hand, immersive experiences can really reduce stigma,” she says.
Raise awareness among young people
Since mental health disorders can appear during adolescence or during the first years of adult life, the project was designed to reach young people as a priority.
The exhibition begins with a video in which beloved young actor Pascal Morrissette plays an expert who summarizes reactions to mental health disorders throughout history: hole drilled in the brain during the Neolithic period, punishment for sin in the Middle Ages, appearance of asylums and houses of correction in the Renaissance, use of electroshock and lobotomy, introduction of medicines in the mid-20th century, etc.
Then, the public has access to four immersive boxes. The most successful is the one which plunges us into the head of a teenage girl in the middle of a panic attack. We feel his discomfort, his suffocation, his racing heart and his inability to calm down.
The experience which takes us inside the head of a young thirty-year-old living with schizophrenia is also very eloquent. While he answers a questionnaire, we hear the thoughts running through his head, the conviction of being at the center of a conspiracy, the voices and threats. “Participants experience the whole thing for three minutes, whereas people who live with a disorder on a daily basis, it’s all the time,” explains Guylaine Moore. Experiencing this immersion helps us develop our empathy and kindness. »
To understand bipolarity, we observe the interactive agenda of an adolescent girl in a period of heightened enthusiasm and in a depressive moment, without energy, in a black hole, with thoughts resonating through the speakers. The immersion is less impactful than the previous two, but remains very relevant.
The immersive box dedicated to depression is a little less effective in making us fully feel the symptoms. We mainly hear the inner dialogue of a young person at his work: his negative thoughts go round and round and his perspective becomes blurred. However, the text seems less natural to us than the other three.
We had some doubts about the game The Weight of Words, during which we must choose what response to provide to a person in psychological distress. The answer choices sometimes seem copied from what an experienced speaker would say. And not on the probable reactions of Mr. and Mrs. Everybody.
That said, EpiSens is worth the detour. Both to better understand what people experiencing mental health disorders experience and to open a dialogue. “Because of stereotypes and misunderstanding in society, people who live with these disorders don’t talk about them,” says Guylaine Moore. When we exchange, everyone moves forward and we evolve our thinking. »
