LIVING e-MOTIONS: Emotional education through visual storyliving for people with mental health challenges Erasmus Project

Project Title

LIVING e-MOTIONS: Emotional education through visual storyliving for people with mental health challenges

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Inclusion – equity; Disabilities – special needs

Project Summary

Emotions are a main part of us. They often drag us and prevent us from carrying out our goals or hamper our relationships with those around us. Throughout our lives, we are encouraged to learn many things: technical knowledge, behavioral norms, social abilities, etc. But it remains strange to be educated in our own emotional functioning: traditionally, emotions have been something that might be repressed or just hided and the consequences are of course negative.

The need to learn how to handle our emotions becomes more obvious in people who have suffered any type of mental health challenges in their lives. Normally, these episodes are accompanied by a deficit in the management of one’s feelings and a loss of social skills when interacting with other people. Here arises the need for an initiative such as LIVING e-MOTIONS, a training program in emotional education specifically designed for people with mental health challenges that uses an innovative methodology: visual story-living.

It is proven that putting feelings into words has therapeutic effects, indeed storytelling has revealed as a powerful recovery tool, especially for the people with mental health troubles. But LIVING e-MOTIONS goes a step further: we want you not just tell you a story but make you FEEL our own story. Story-living means putting into other’s shoes, feel what the other feels but… how to do it? We have used visual narrative, that is to say, short videos told in first person where people with mental health challenges tell us about their feelings and their recovery stories from a positive perspective. Feel, as close as possible, what a person with mental health troubles feels.

LIVING e-MOTIONS is a training course on emotional education composed by eight sessions especially thought for the needs of people with mental illness. The teaching methodology is based on visual story-living, which means that the learners reflect about their own emotions and recovery experiences in front of a camera after the training period. They are the protagonist of their own story. It was planned that some of the learners told about their recovery story during live events, following the style of the TED talks but unfortunately, due to COVID-19 pandemic, it was not possible to implement this dissemination action to fight against the social stigma that still persists attached to mental illness.

One of the objectives of this training course was to increase the basic competences of the people with mental health challenges, increase their wellbeing and improve their quality of life. We think that, despite the unforeseen difficulties we had to face, we managed to achived it. Their voices have been heard and we gave their emotions the place they deserve.

The training course was piloted in Spain and Estonia during 2020, involving 21 adults and young adults with mental health challenges. As a result of those experiences, we created the Living e-Motions TELL IT OUT! portfolio: an inspiring collection of real stories showing that the recovery from mental illness does exist and to highlight the efforts made by the people living with it to overcome. The competences acquired or improved by the participants have been recognized with the “Learning passport”, a reflecting document that certificates the progress made and thus helping to continue with the empowerment process.

All the teaching materials, results, success stories, blogs about the training course, guidelines to certificate the competences, videos, etc. are available in the free e-learning platform LIVING e-MOTIONS WWW.LIVING-EMOTIONS.ORG, so anybody can benefit from this innovative training course. Indeed, one of the activities of the LIVING e-MOTIONS project was to transfer the initiative to other vulnerable target groups during a mentoring program in October-November 2020, as emotion regulation and mental health are something that any person in vulnerable situation must reinforce. We managed to train 12 organizations replicating the Living e-Motions course with their clients.

The training methodology (visual story-living) has been conceived to improve the learning process and to empower the target group, but also as a strong visibility action to inform the general society about mental illness: what it is, how to recognize it, what “recovery” means, etc. The short videos available in the platform are key for a useful dissemination campaign. We want to educate the general society in mental health to promote the reintegration of this target group and, at the same time, facilitate early detection.

LIVING e-MOTIONS is an accessible resource aiming to help people with mental health challenges to lead their own recovery process, support others in this journey and show their reality to the society, always from a creative, fresh, positive and didactic perspective.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 146511 Eur

Project Coordinator

FUNDACION INTRAS & Country: ES

Project Partners

• UNIVERZA V MARIBORU
• ASTANGU KUTSEREHABILITATSIOONI KESKUS
• Penumbra