Project
A six-episode podcast on mental health in Italian universities and conservatoires. It comes out of Health Mode On, a project selected by the Ministry of University and Research to promote psychological and physical wellbeing in the student community.
Lo Stato del Disagio: the Health Mode On podcast on mental health in universities
- Client
- University of Pavia
- Area
- Relations
- Year
- 2026
- Main link
- Listen to the podcast
Lo Stato del Disagio is a six-episode podcast on mental health in Italian universities and conservatoires. It comes out of Health Mode On, a PRO-BEN project funded by the Ministry of University and Research and coordinated by the University of Pavia to study and promote psychological and physical wellbeing in the student community.
The starting point is a phenomenon now plain to see: requests for help are rising, and anxiety, depression and emotional difficulty are increasing among people who study. But talking about distress means holding very different questions together: mental health, family expectations, competition, financial circumstances, digital transformation, relationships and the future.
The podcast attempts this by setting students' experience in relation to the perspectives of psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers, academics and public health specialists.
No culprits, no quick solutions
This was the editorial choice at the base of the project. Not to look for a single cause of distress and not to build a reassuring answer, but to open a space in which different perspectives can meet and, at times, come into tension.
From this follows the form of the podcast too: long interviews, some twenty guests, different disciplines and an edit built to create dialogues between people who have often never met.
The six episodes follow that approach, taking on six knots: the passage into adulthood, listening to distress and taking it on, the relationship between social media and mental health, performance and perfectionism, the material conditions of student life and, finally, the role the university can take on as a community.
From research to narrative
Dinamo curated and produced the podcast, supporting the writing of the author Nicolò Porcelluzzi, organising and running the interviews and building the editorial direction of each episode together with the working group.
The audio work was also set inside a wider editorial system: each episode is accompanied on healthmodeon.it by a piece that develops the themes, research and questions raised during the listening. The podcast thereby becomes one of the instruments through which Health Mode On carries research on student wellbeing beyond its specialist boundaries and into a wider public discussion.
The six episodes
Client: University of Pavia / Health Mode On
Curation and production: Dinamo
Production: Giulio Burroni
Writing and voice: Nicolò Porcelluzzi
Editing and sound design: Milo Adami
Direction and post-production: Matteo Scandolin
Additional voices: Luca Misculin, Elisa Lemma
Voice on the title sequence: Irene Fioravanti
Year: 2025–2026