With the state of the country’s mental health care in the trusted hands of a telecommunications company, Bell is no stranger to powerful campaigns. Bell Let’s Talk, established in 2011, has shifted the culture of mental health from something to talk about to something to tweet about once a year and never ever mention again.
Hoping to reinvent the depressed wheel, Bell introduced a new initiative to help people move past their issues.
Bell Let’s Dance!, the new initiative making waves and body rolls across the nation, hopes to encourage Canadians to be more open with their minds, and their bodies. By encouraging Canadians to dance their blues away, Bell Let’s Dance! is setting a new precedent for addressing mental health.
“When we started Bell Let’s Talk, we wanted more dialogue about peoples encounters with mental health,” said Bell CEO George A. Cope to The Medium. “After a few successful years of elevating the conversation around mental illness, we here at Bell are honestly so sick of hearing about everyone’s problems. We just want to party and have fun.”
Here at UTM this past Bell Let’s Talk day, students experiencing mental health issues were urged to seek out the newly established dance floor in the CCT atrium. The dance floor, a result of a six-month study which lead to the creation of a taskforce which produced a faculty-committee to come up with fun ways to be depressed, is only costing the university a gentle six hundred thousand. The floor comes equipped with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) disco-lights—lights so bright they bleach the mental illness right out of you. And if you’re worried about having nothing to listen to but the constant un-merry-go-round of your thoughts, Bell Lets Dance! has you covered. They have the best uplifting hits, like “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten and “Can’t Stop the Feeling” by Justin Timberlake.
Not ready to dance to the sound of your own drum? There were certified dance instructor counsellors ready to assist you developing your choreography and coping skills. Workshops included Anger Management and Krumping, How to Twerk the Trauma Away, Ballet & Bipolarism, Schizophrenia & Shuffling and as the grand finale, U of T president Meric Gertler gave students a demonstration on how to do the Worm.
So, when academic stress and the winter blues get you down, why not booty-pop your way into some serotonin?
