Australian not-for-profit foundation and health promotion charity Gotcha4Life has launched a new Mental Health Month campaign designed to help Australians better understand, articulate and act on their emotions through practical mental fitness tools.
The campaign centres on six new emotions designed to capture feelings and experiences which many Australians may recognise in their day-to-day lives, from feeling overwhelmed and ‘stretched too thin’ to finding moments of relief, optimism, and connection.
The campaign marks the latest chapter in Gotcha4Life’s partnership with creative agency, ScienceFiction and Omnicom Media agency, Initiative.
The emotions form part of Gotcha4Life’s growing dictionary of modern emotions, using relatable and light-hearted language to capture feelings many people experience but don’t always have the words to describe. Each is linked to a practical exercise in the charity’s free Mental Fitness Gym app, helping people turn emotional awareness into action.
The six emotions introduced this year include:
- Spiralo: when your mind jumps straight to the worst-case version of everything.
- The Blahs: when nothing’s wrong, but nothing’s moving.
- Breatho: when the pressure eases and you can just breathe again.
- Pullaparted: when life’s pulling you in every direction.
- Crisped: when you’re just trying to hold it together and close to burnout.
- The Glimmers: when you get that little lift from things going right.
Mental Health Month provides a key opportunity to encourage more Australians to stop and think about their own mental wellbeing, but Gotcha4Life believes awareness is merely step one.
Belinda Elworthy, CEO, Gotcha4Life, shares: “Mental Health Month gets more people talking, and we want to build on that by going beyond awareness to something people can use every day. Naming what you’re feeling is an important step in building mental fitness. Each of these new emotions comes with an exercise in the Mental Fitness Gym app, so people can take that step and then do something about it.”
Last year’s campaign secured more than $15 million in donated media support and drove close to 7,000 app downloads, accounting for almost half of all Mental Fitness Gym app downloads during the year.
Matt Arbon, creative partner, ScienceFiction: “Plenty of Australians are feeling Pullaparted right now. This partnership is the opposite with Gotcha4Life, Initiative and ScienceFiction all pulling the same way, year after year. That’s what turns a social cause into a national campaign. This year we want these words to travel even further, into the places people are actually feeling them.”
Danielle Galipienzo, head of impact, Initiative: “Our role in media is to help bring this conversation into everyday life, reaching people in the moments and places where these emotions are already showing up, and connecting them with practical tools to support their mental fitness.
Consistency in our media approach over the last four years has resulted in growing use of the mental fitness gym app, showing the impact of driving meaningful action and outcomes for the mental fitness of all Australians.”
