A large percentage of us struggling with mental health there felt misunderstood and unable to identify with traditional psychiatry and psychology, conventional diagnoses and mental health newspeak. As a community, there were many of us that spoke at length about our experiences with our mental health but often felt it was a real struggle putting into words exactly what we, our friends and our family members were going through. This in turn made it very hard to relate and identify with others and their own struggles on a deeper and really meaningful level. We found the blanket terms and diagnoses that had been thrown at us over the years were in most cases vague and rarely representative of our own experience.

What became quickly apparent was that this feeling of being misunderstood and not really understanding what we were experiencing ourselves was holding a lot of us back from becoming strong, resilient and ultimately healing. At Tilted East, we understand the first step to healing is by identifying the issue that you are dealing with, understanding that what you are going through is very normal and in turn, being able to drop the stigma around that struggle.

Getting people to ‘talk’ about their struggles, as beneficial as it was to some and as important it is for us all as a first step, wasn’t the complete answer for a lot of us and talking alone sometimes left us struggling to communicate exactly how our struggles were affecting us.

It was in our weekly art class that we started to realise what an extremely powerful tool imagery and creative design can be for communication. It helped us express our experiences in ways that just weren’t possible with words alone and we quickly found ourselves relating to each other on a much deeper level. For example, some of us were suddenly able to express certain bodily sensations through the use of colour and intensity of shading. Our experiences with this showed us just how healing being properly understood for the first time can be.

This is why we created Tilted East; to give people the best opportunity to be understood, to be able to relate and identify with others on a meaningful level and ultimately take part in a fun and creative project, which aims to benefit them and all the other millions of people struggling with their mental health.