2024
Mental Health
As a social impact communication agency based in Thailand, conversations around the state of the nation’s mental health awareness and the alarming statistics about the high rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses have been circulating in our office for a while now — since 2020 to be exact.
This was why back in 2020, Love Frankie decided to turn the mental health conversations amongst ourselves into a much larger exchange for the public. We launched “The Nook”, a mental health project kicking off with a bustling in-person mental health festival that received heartwarming responses from over 500 attendees — right before the unprecedented global pandemic necessitated lockdowns.
The glowing smiles, the honest conversations, and the wholehearted participation at the 2020 event showed us what the local news reports and the statistics didn’t, and that was how crucial it is for mental health to be welcomed as a part of everyday conversations, particularly for Thai youth. And whether this happy-go-lucky nation is ready for it or not, we believe this is the one movement that would truly make a difference in the lives of the younger generations of Thais.
So four years later in March 2024, we returned with a bigger, bolder, and braver festival.
Drawing on insights, creativity, and strategies akin to those of a reinvented pop star inches away from dropping a surprise album, we orchestrated "The Nook Presents: We’re Being," a four-day mental health festival held over the last two weekends of March. Admission was free, and the event aimed to redefine and reimagine public engagement with mental health, ensuring it wasn’t positioned as an underlying consequence of other issues like domestic violence or addiction – like how it’s been done in the past.
Yes, “mainstream” was our North Star strategy because since we all have feelings, mental health is not a topic that can be ignored or considered uncomfortable.
Our goal wasn’t to help our young attendees be rid of their negative feelings but to realize that having them is part of the human experience.
Even if sometimes they feel like a hangry Rottweiler grunting in a dark corner of your mind, feelings are not flaws — they are signals, guiding you in what you need. The safer you feel discussing them, the sooner you’ll find the liberation to make sense of them, tame them, or better yet, find your strongest self emerging from them.
Our 2024 festival provided a safe space for Thai youth to do just that — embrace and process their emotions, empowering them to find strength in vulnerability.
While we never underestimated the amount of work this festival required, what we didn’t expect was the overwhelming feedback echoed back to us. We now know that, even though there’s still a long way to go on the path of improving Thailand’s mental health landscape, the feedback we received confirmed our impact, highlighting our small agency’s significant role in advancing the discourse.
This was the comeback we will continue to beam about with pride — from desk to desk, from heart to heart.
Four days, over 1,200 attendees, and 100K+ likes and shares on social media later, Love Frankie’s “We’re Being” festival has demonstrated that nothing beats a good intention and a great strategy – especially when you are trying to solve a not-so-new problem through a brand new lens.
Of course, our festival couldn’t have been possible without our brand partners like Toms, LomPrayah, BDMS, Maybelline, and Sabai Arom for their support and thanks to our venue partner, Slow Combo, for providing us with the blank canvas to execute our vision.
Lastly, since no human mind is truly a spotless one, Love Frankie looks forward to continuing to provide the safety of The Nook for as long as human feelings persist to make us feel NO-OK.
