Shane’s mental health ‘Reach’ video goes viral
A VIDEO highlighting mental health - made by a young New Ross man - has gone viral, attracting the attention of national mental health organisations.
Shane O’Connor, from Mount Carmel, decided to make the video during a period when he felt down and released it on World Mental Health Day last Tuesday. He saw it as a way of highlighting various problems people in Irish society face.
Shane’s video Reach has been seen by thousands of people and shared hundreds of times on social media platforms.
Shane said: ‘For the last year or so I have been working on a mental health video trying to raise awareness on the subject. I came up with the idea when I started a new job working from home last October and I was trying to find videos and stuff online about mental health and there wasn’t much out there, so I decided to make my own with a pen and paper, my camera and some friends.’
The video - which lasts four minutes - focusses in on a man who is about to lose his home, a mother who finds it difficult to bond with her child, a suicidal man who doesn’t know how to communicate his problems with his mother. It encourages people to reach out and seek help and includes helpline numbers for Pieta House, the Samaritans, Aware and It’s Good To Talk.
Shane, 24, asked some of his friends, Brendan Staples, Gemma Delaney, Lyanne O’Brien, Rob Grimes and Zoe McCormack to act in Reach, having found the transition from working with a group of colleagues to working alone at home difficult. ‘I started working from home last October and when you finish doing your work, it’s just pure silence. I was looking up videos on Youtube but there was nothing out there like I had in mind. I was a bit lonely and a bit down and I found it made things a bit better working on the video.’
Shane, who is a photographer, started writing dialogues on different issues and turned to friends who he thought could relate to their characters to some extent. Filming began in Wexford and Waterford in March and finished in mid-September.
‘I filmed it on my DSLR camera. It has already received a good reaction. I had a letter from a New Ross man living in Donegal who said it really resonated with him and some middle aged ladies stopped me in a supermarket and told me about what it meant to them. The Shine mental health organisation in Waterford are interested in using part of the video as are a national organisation.’
The video - which ends with all of the characters in better places mentally, features one scene in which a character goes to hang himself.
Shane said he felt it was important to include the scene, having debated whether or not to for some time. ‘I decided to keep it in as I wanted the message to hit home. People don’t talk about suicide and don’t see it and if people do see it in a video it makes it more real. The video’s views are going up and up. I only thought my friends would be watching it, so it’s great that it’s getting so much exposure.’