I Sat My Friends Down and Asked them Hard Hitting Questions.  

As of January 2017, one in four adults will experience a mental illness at some point in their lives each year in the UK. A growing crisis has also shown that 75% of young people are not receiving the correct treatment. With the biggest killer in young men and women aged 20-34 being suicide, the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that the number of suicides from that age group is much greater than it has been for the past ten years, with three quarters of those having committed suicide in 2016 (taken from the latest release the Office of National Statistics has) being men.

 

Mental illness and disorders are extremely common in young people, with many debates arising of whether social media is doing more harm than good to the millennial society of today. Social and dating apps such as Instagram and Tinder have sparked a demise in those with positive body images; a study showing that through a survey of 1044 women and 273 men, 1 in 10 participants admitted to using Tinder and were more self-conscious of their body image than those who didn’t. 

 

Co-author Jessica Strübel, PHD says “we found that being actively involved with Tinder, regardless of the user’s gender, was associated with body dissatisfaction, internalization of societal expectations of beauty, comparing oneself physically to others and reliance on media for information on appearance and attractiveness.”

 

With this knowledge, I sat my friends down and asked them hard hitting questions about sexual topics and body image. One by one I had them answer questions they had never previously answered individually in front of a camera. By doing this I was able to capture their first initial reactions and the most organic and honest answers they could give.

 

With the growing epidemic in mental health issues and disorders in young people, I created a project called ‘The Emotions Lookbook’ in which each episode consists of different topics young adults find most comfortable keeping to themselves or have trouble coming to terms with due to society shutting them out. 

 

Watch the ‘Sex and Body Image’ episode now: