Handling depression and substance abuse with care, with the help of Gen Z
Havas New York was commissioned by non-profit The Harris Project to raise awareness of combatting co-occurring disorders – the ill-understood but high-risk combination of substance abuse and other mental health troubles. Friends see one of their own partying too hard. Teachers see a pupil wrestling with anxiety. Parents see a son or daughter slipping into a depression. No-one sees the whole.
“You Don’t Know The Half of It” addresses this head-on. The film follows a teen drinking game as it turns really, really real, with one young person using the confessional format to finally open up about their struggles with addiction and self-hatred. It creates a rhythm that pulls the viewer through the whole of her troubled life, ending with deep silence: awkward, but sincere.
“Friends see one of their own partying way too hard. Teachers see a pupil wrestling with anxiety. Parents see a son or daughter slipping into a depression. No-one sees the whole.”
The Havas team won a Yellow Pencil in the Writing for Advertising category, but are keen to stress that the film was co-created by the Gen Z cast and others who suffer from co-occurring disorders: every word said on-screen comes from the mouth of someone with the condition, as Creative Director Lindsey Rock says in the above film. This is the advice that they are keen to stress: that portraying such a sensitive issue means drawing the intended audience into the production process at every step. Learning to let go of assumptions about teenagers, their behaviour and their language was essential:
“The writing and editing process is how you really come to true craft of this level,” says Creative Director Tyronne Schaffer. “This was a point where we just had to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and continue to stay close with our audience to make sure what we were writing was genuine. And that often meant putting our own taste, our own egos, aside to make sure that we really came through, after multiple drafts, to something that people felt rang true for them and they could see themselves in … It was extremely humbling and fun to get really hardcore feedback from that audience. They kind of became our real clients, and were the final say on what felt real to them. And we couldn't say no to that.”