Making distress visible without branding it: the Health Mode On case

In recent years mental health has become a settled presence in public, cultural and corporate communication. It is an important change, because anxiety, depression, burnout and emotional difficulty have come out of a repertoire dominated by clinical or stigmatising imagery.

Hospital corridors, darkened rooms and faces hidden in hands have given way to warm colours, soft shapes, inclusive illustration and informal typefaces. That transformation has made much content more accessible and has allowed people to recognise themselves without feeling immediately reduced to a diagnosis.

When that solution becomes an automatic grammar, however, distress takes on a paradoxically comfortable appearance. Anxiety becomes a pastel gradient, depression a figure sitting beside a plant, fragility a word set in gentle lettering. The aesthetic conceived to bring people closer thereby risks softening what it ought to help us understand.

The problem does not lie in making something unpleasant look pleasant. Any representation requires a form and no form is neutral. The question concerns what that form allows us to see and what it leaves in the background.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag shows how exposure to images of suffering does not automatically produce understanding or responsibility. An image can inform and preserve memory, but it can also separate pain from the context that produced it, leaving the viewer with an emotion as intense as it is brief.

Something similar often happens in mental health communication. We can recognise ourselves in the story of a student who can no longer bear the pressure of exams without the cost of housing, the organisation of teaching, employment insecurity or the accessibility of services becoming visible. The individual story is easier to tell; the context takes more space and introduces responsibilities less easily attributed.

Nor does the shift from traumatic to empathetic communication resolve the problem. Lilie Chouliaraki has observed how some humanitarian campaigns, abandoning the more violent images, progressively adopted lighter forms of engagement, compatible with the languages of consumption. In these cases attention can shift from the condition represented to the moral identity of the person watching and sharing.

The same dynamic can apply to mental health. A university looks welcoming because it uses a language close to students; a company looks aware because it publishes a testimonial; a project seems capable of care because it adopts a reassuring aesthetic. When the institution's image prevails over the usefulness of the content, empathy becomes a quality of the brand.

Health Mode On needed a recognisable identity. The project brings together different partners, places and activities which, without a common system, would have been hard to connect. Giving up the identity would therefore not have avoided simplification: it would have produced fragmentary and hardly accessible communication.

The name already contains a compromise. Mode on evokes switching a mode on and suggests the possibility of entering a different disposition towards health. It is an immediate metaphor, but it can make wellbeing seem an individual function to be switched on. The same formula that makes the project memorable therefore brushes against the culture of personal optimisation that some of its content sets out to question.

We accepted that tension because the alternative would probably have been a long, correct and unmemorable institutional name. The editorial work then had to complicate what the name simplifies, avoiding any presentation of mental health as the result of an individual act or of the right personal attitude.

The palette too partly uses the warm codes of wellbeing communication. The choice makes it possible to keep a distance from clinical white and medical blue, while sharper contrasts and dark surfaces prevent the identity from being wholly pacifying. The problem in any case does not concern the moral meaning of a colour, but the risk that graphic coherence will be mistaken for coherence of experience.

Anxiety, depression, loneliness, eating disorders and financial hardship are not variations of the same state of mind. If the identity gathers them inside a common atmosphere, the content has to restore the differences the visual system inevitably reduces.

A similar choice concerned the images. We avoided the more explicit repertoire of distress — curled-up bodies, faces in shadow, isolated figures — because it would have reduced individuals to the moment of their suffering. We preferred a more abstract illustrative system, aware that this solution too has its limit: it protects against stigmatisation, but makes distress cleaner and more compatible with serial communication.

Photography would have introduced another problem, obliging us to choose who could represent the student in difficulty. A suffering face would have produced a stereotype; a smiling one would have brought the project closer to generic wellbeing communication. For this reason photography and illustration took on different functions, with neither treated as a definitive solution.

The third compromise concerns the tone of voice. Health Mode On seeks a closeness that avoids administrative language, while the manifesto sets people against users, growth against performance, relationships against procedures. These formulas define an orientation clearly, but they also tend to distribute values a little too neatly. A procedure can be impersonal, but it can guarantee fairness; a relationship matters, but it does not replace resources and competences.

To offset the necessary compression of the manifesto, the editorial plan was conceived as a more articulated path. The twenty-four annual stories, spread across articles, carousels and stories, take the audience from recognising the problem to knowing the research, the activities and the services.

Calling this path a funnel is technically correct, but applying the term to mental health reveals another tension. A funnel steers a person towards an expected behaviour. In our case that behaviour may be reading an in-depth piece or reaching a service, but it remains necessary to remember that nobody coincides with the route designed for them. You can read without recognising yourself, recognise yourself without asking for help, or seek help and not find it immediately available.

A clear architecture is necessary; it becomes problematic when it presents the passage from awareness to care as a linear sequence.

An article, a carousel, a video testimonial and a podcast are not interchangeable containers. Each medium establishes a duration, a hierarchy and a different relationship between the person speaking and the person listening.

Social demands rapid recognition. Formulas such as "do you feel like this too?" or lists of symptoms can offer words to someone who had none, but they can also encourage an individualised reading of distress. Every difficulty risks becoming a psychological identity, while its social conditions stay in the background.

The guidance published by the World Health Organization in 2024 for digital content aimed at young people insists on the need to combine emotional relevance, inclusiveness and scientific evidence. Mind's guidelines further advise against simplifying causes, against presenting a single solution as valid for everyone, and in favour of acknowledging the concrete obstacles that can make access to support difficult.

These are important criteria, but not sufficient ones. A piece of content can use the right words and still be paternalistic; it can avoid stigmatising images and still turn suffering into a quality of the sender. Responsibility therefore also concerns the structure of the medium and the expectations that medium produces.

It is out of this awareness that Lo Stato del Disagio was born. Some subjects could not be carried by the ordinary editorial system alone, because they required time, discordant voices and the possibility of leaving certain questions open.

The six episodes take on the passage into adulthood, the role of universities in listening, the relationship with the digital, the pressure to perform, the material conditions of student life and the possibility of rethinking the university as a community. The declared intent is not to identify a single culprit or to propose quick solutions, but to set psychological, social and institutional levels in relation to one another.

The podcast, written and narrated by Nicolò Porcelluzzi, was produced by Dinamo through work lasting over a year, with editing and sound design by Milo Adami and direction and post-production by Matteo Scandolin. The edit builds dialogues between people who have often never met: one voice puts forward a hypothesis, another limits it; a figure is set beside an experience; a clinical category meets the point at which it is no longer enough.

This form is not, in principle, more neutral than a carousel. The interviews are selected, shortened and arranged in a sequence. The silences, the music and the tone of the narrating voice steer the listening too. Audio does not eliminate aestheticisation: it makes it less visible.

We tried to reduce that risk by avoiding turning every testimony into an emotional climax and by giving up, where possible, on reassuring conclusions. The podcast does not end each episode with an answer and does not bring all the voices back to a common position. That choice protects part of the complexity, but it makes the product less easily usable as a promotional instrument.

It is here that the long form comes into tension with institutional communication. A public project has to document results, reach audiences and produce materials its partners can use. A documentary podcast, by contrast, takes time and accepts that some of its effects will remain hard to measure.

Coexistence between these demands is possible, but it is not automatic. It requires the client to accept supporting content it does not control in every conclusion, and the authors to recognise that they are working inside a system of public responsibilities. Authorship, in this context, does not coincide with absolute independence; it consists in the possibility of keeping the tensions visible without using the client as a simple target or the podcast as its celebration.

Communicating mental health therefore requires accurate language, reliable sources and attention to the people involved. But it also requires treating aesthetics, editing and information architecture as parts of the content.

A palette can reduce the distance from medical communication and, at the same time, make distress too comfortable. An illustration can avoid stigma and produce an abstract experience. A testimony can break the silence and become an emotional shortcut. A long podcast can preserve contradictions and build, through the edit, a coherence that did not previously exist.

There is therefore no form immune to the problem. There are forms more or less aware of their own effects, and processes capable, or incapable, of correcting them.

In the case of Health Mode On, the aim was not to build an identity that would represent distress perfectly, because such a representation would be impossible. The work consisted in creating a recognisable system and, at the same time, leaving enough space in the content for that system to be contradicted and deepened.

Lo Stato del Disagio takes that choice further, because it changes the time granted to listening. It does not resolve the tension between communication and suffering, but it at least avoids closing it inside a formula.

This is perhaps the most concrete task of the media when they take on mental health: making distress visible without claiming to exhaust it, offering tools for understanding it without turning it into a surface on which an institution can simply recognise its own image.