Mental health animations for youth
A series of 9 educational animations on mindfulness and mental health for teens
Overview
For many young people, a YouTube video is more accessible than a therapist. SickKids needed animations that could meet teens where they are, explain abstract mental health concepts in a relatable way, and give them practical tools they could actually use.
We created a series of 9 animated videos for the SickKids AboutKidsHealth YouTube channel and Teens Mental Health Learning Hub. The series has accumulated over 1.5M views, with "You Are Not Your Thoughts" reaching 1.3M viewers on its own.
We worked within SickKids' established character design system and adapted licensed stock illustrations to maintain a consistent visual style across the series.
We also produced the following videos in this series:
Approach
Health literacy
We applied Mayer's Multimedia Learning Principles to reduce cognitive load. Each video explains one concept at a time and times animation with narration and on-screen text.
Complex emotional concepts are made concrete through visual metaphor. For example, suppressing feelings becomes holding a beach ball underwater, thoughts become waves passing through the mind, and feelings in the body are represented as coloured orbs to help viewers identify and externalize them.
Trauma-informed
Each video portrays a realistic teen scenario with warmth and without shame: social anxiety around making new friends, grief from losing a pet, lying awake worrying about math, and uncertainty about what comes after graduation. We chose a gentle, slower pace as well as warm, calming background music to maintain a sense of safety.
Cultural responsiveness
We designed for diversity, including characters of different ethnicities, body types, and abilities, including a character who uses a wheelchair, a character with a stoma, and non-binary characters.
