LISTEN 2.0: Let’s be Aware of Depression

Depression is one of mental health disorders which has been experienced by many people in the world, including Indonesia. This mental health disorder could happen at any age, but is commonly experienced by teenagers. Approximately, there are 264 million people per year in 2019 suffering from depression. This is definitely not a small number and it means that depression is a serious problem that should get a lot of attention to solve it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major effect on our lives, one of them affects mental health. During the pandemic, the number of mental health disorders including depression cases in Indonesia increased significantly. Despite these high numbers of depression cases, there are still many people who don’t realize the importance of mental health. In response to this situation, CIMSA UGM created a project called LISTEN 2.0.

LISTEN 2.0 is an activity held by SCOPH CIMSA UGM in order to raise people’s awareness about how important our mental health is, and focuses on the topic “Self-Love Matters”. This project consists of 3 sessions, air campaign, webinar, and social experiment.

On air campaign session volunteers helped us to share Instagram’s story about self-love using their Instagram account. Next, the webinar session started with a pre-test, followed by psychologist Irma Gustiana A. S.Psi, M.Psi that presented about why we should love ourselves  and a presentation by Vice Coordinator of Into The Light Indonesia, Sylvia Andriana about why we should not do a self-diagnosis. Then, a sharing session with a mental health survivor, Rityasiwi Gita, a Q & A session, and a focused group discussion where we collaborated with CPMH (Center for Public Mental Health) UGM for supervision and ended with a post-test. At the very end of this session, chosen participants were given a chance to do counselling with a psychologist, hoping they can feel better about what bothers them lately. In the social experiment session, we used Ome TV as our platform. There, volunteers pretended to have a problem related to mental health and they would see how people reacted to those things. After that, volunteers introduced themselves, appreciated if those people reacted in a good way, and volunteers also gave education about self-love.

We hope that our activities could help people to understand more about the importance of self-love in achieving good mental health, love themselves better, and help people around them who suffer from depression.