Story Setup
Choose a Title about Your Mental Health Challenges
Depression and Anxiety
Here's an example for inspiration
Make a visual story about how you deal with Depression or Anxiety in your life, or other mental health challenges. It might be helpful to share the BioGraff you make with your mental health professional. Below, you'll find some ideas for titles of your story. You can use one of these, or be inspired to make your own. You can substitute "depression" or "anxiety" with whatever you call your particular mental health challenge.
Title Ideas:
- How Depression Feels
How Anxiety Feels
A Timeline of the Triggers: How it Begins
A Timeline of My Self-Soothing Techniques
A Lifeline of The Cycle of My Depression
A Lifeline of the Cycle of My Anxiety
A Timeline of a Day in the Life of Me, Depressed
A Timeline of What I Do When It's Happening
My Mind on Depression
My Mind on Anxiety
A Timeline of a Day in My Life Free From My Mental Health Challenge
A Timeline of Depression Start to Finish
A Timeline of Anxiety Start to Finish
How My People See My Illness
How My Mental Health Challenge Helps Me
A Timeline of Making the Anxiety Go Away
A Timeline of Anxiety Over the Course of a Day
A Lifeline of Anxiety Over a Long Period of Time
Life Impacts of My Depression
What I Would Be Without My Mental Health Challenge
Things That Get In the Way
A Comparison: My Life and My Life Free from Anxiety
My Depression in My Body
My Anxiety in My Body
My Depression in a Particular Context
My Anxiety in a Particular Context
My Medication Side Effects and Me
My Internal Critic
What It's Like in My Head
STEP 2
Story Setup and Structure
If you have a BioGraffs Mag Plus, you are ready for Step 2!
Or head back to the Virtual Tool to make your BioGraff online.
If you have a Mini, each person needs some plain paper and a pen.
Your story deserves a sturdy support. Consider putting a hardcover book or cutting board behind it, in case you want to move it around, which you might. Draw a frame around the edge of your paper.
Write the title you chose at the top.
This is the canvas for your visual story.
Think of the parts of this story and list them somewhere under the title. These parts can be thoughts, feelings, events, actions, objects, desires, circumstances... anything you need them to be. You don't need to use a lot of words - just enough so that you know what you mean. Think of it as a placeholder for a big concept.
It's natural to want to write the whole story on the page. Challenge yourself to stay with the visual. And don't worry: you can tell more of what each cube means when you tell your BioGraff story later.
Assign each one a color.
It might look something like this:
STEP 3
Build Your BioGraff
Now you are ready to tell your visual story. Look through the BioGraff Storyboard Style cards for examples of how to do that.
Every story has a structure - think about how a movie sometimes shows you one scene, then goes back in time to tell how the protagonist got into that mess. Or a story is from one particular person's point of view, and then switches to another point of view.
A visual story has a structure too. Even a single image.
BioGraffs started out as an interactive art installation. Over the course of two years, we asked over a thousand people to tell a visual story using cubes to stand for parts of the story. Common strategies emerged. These eight cards represent the strategies we observed people using, and might help you think through how you want to represent your own story.
One of these styles might work for the story you want to tell, or you might have a style of your own in mind.
Build your BioGraff however makes the most sense to you. Once you've decided what the colors mean, you are done with words. Let your instinct guide how you lay out the cubes. Let metaphor take over and express meaning in the cubes' relationships to one another.
As you become more experience building these visual stories, you will begin to see new ways to express your internal stories in a visual way.
STEP 4
Sharing Your Story
Talking about your BioGraff creation is the BioGraff Superpower!
The BioGraffs Mag Plus comes with 2 magnetic whiteboards so you can do this activity with a partner or friend, and share your creations. Conversation becomes storytelling time and you each get to share your story completely.
Feel more heard. SEE what each other means.
Use the two storytelling cards to keep focused on your role, whether you are the listener, or the storyteller
Using BioGraffs on your own.
You'll want your camera once again to take a picture of your BioGraff.
You might want to share your BioGraff story with a significant person, or with your therapist. Your creation now becomes a visual aid that anchors your story. Tell the story it represents; say more about what each cube means, and why you laid them out the way you did.
The visual gives you a way to zero in on details, but easily return to the big picture. It invites curiosity from the person you are sharing
your story with.
It gives you a way to tell the whole story.
You might want to make another BioGraff, or even another one with the same title and a different Style Card. See what else can be revealed.