- Amanda McGeshick is the program manager for Centerstone.
In working with the mental health of the community, my team and I teach students topics ranging from depression to the prevention of teenage pregnancy. And we have been duly trained in how to communicate with our audience.
I can share the very best data to convince tweens and teens to take our lessons into account, but if not presented in a convincing way, they may not be paying attention. It’s so important to meet people where they are, and that’s how Centerstone Comics and our superhero Spark came about.
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Creates a spark through comics
It started when a colleague saw a cartoon about Martin Luther King, Jr. If the medium can teach history, then it can convey our messages.
We continued to develop a teenage character named Amber Hernandez, who is a student by day and “Spark” by night.
Next, we wrote stories about the issues we address – online safety, sexting, bullying, suicide prevention, underage alcohol consumption and more. A visual artist brings our characters to life and we create focus groups with students and parents prior to release.
Feedback from these focus groups advised us to make Amber representative of who children are today. She is a multi-racist student living in a single-parent home. Her mother died and she has obviously struggled with depression.
Whether she’s acting like Amber or Spark – whether she’s outsmarting an online catfishing scheme or shutting down an illegal opioid drug operation – her action-packed adventures always manage to relate back to reducing the stigma that all too often surrounds mental health problems.
It is also important that our comics can be learned as they are used in classrooms, community houses and beyond. Each Spark story includes an excerpt discussion guide to bridge the communication gap between students and adults.
Comics are a great way to start a difficult conversation
It’s a lot less scary to read a cartoon together than it is to just sit down and say, “Let’s talk about sexting.” This is a concept we have also expanded into our “Speak to Me” commercial advertising campaign that encourages healthy parent-child conversations.
Everyone can participate in the conversation; our stories can be read for free online in English and Spanish. While our funding makes it possible to distribute hard copies in Tennessee, where our grant is based, they have also been used by project staff in Washington, DC, and even landed in comic book stores. There have been requests for comics from Spark from nearly 20 different states as well as the Bahamas.
Finally, it is important to keep these discussions going as major topics continue to unfold. Our recent story, Spark Unmasked, addresses issues of identity among LGBTQ + youth.
We have met a lot of young people whose mental health is suffering due to stigma and discrimination in this space. We are also considering future stories of body image, diversity and self-esteem. I hope our efforts will pique your interest and that you will join the conversation!
Amanda McGeshick is the program manager for Teen Pregnancy Prevention at Centerstone, a nonprofit health care system specializing in mental health and substance abuse disorders.