Your
Story Matters

​Stage 1: Story interviews

 

Sampling Method

In order to comprehensively and truly reflect the life, experiences, and thoughts of depressive individuals and their friends and relatives, this project has adopted purposive sampling by recruiting university students suffering from depression and their caregivers to source personal life stories as the basis of the drama script.

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Participants

A total of 30 participants have been recruited for the interviews, with 10 interviewees being university students who suffer from depression and 20 interviewees being caregivers (including parents, friends, etc.) of depressive individuals. 

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Methodology

Questions for the semi-structured interviews were designed based on the Semi-structured Interview Measure of Stigma (SIMS) (Wood et al., 2016). Questions mainly focused on obtaining participants' personal experiences of depression and stigmatization. Before the start of the interviews, debriefing sessions were held and consent from each participant was collected to reduce the possibility of any psychological harm caused to the interviewees during the interviews. The emotional and mental conditions of each participant were checked at the end of the interviews. No relapse or emotional outbursts occurred during and after all 30 interviews.
 

Stage 2: Scriptwriting

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Theme Analysis

Grounded theory, a research method commonly employed to undercover social processes which are grounded in data gathered in a systematic way, was adopted as a method of generating themes for scriptwriting (Nobel & Mitchell, 2016). Common themes include misunderstandings from family members, distance growing between partners and themselves, losing the sense of "being normal" and feeling of being "left behind" by the world were analyzed.

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Story Selection

15 real-life stories (10 from depressive individuals and 5 from caregivers) were selected after accessing the feasibility of adaptation and execution (scale and length of the performance), the extent of relatability and resonance with the public, and uniqueness.

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Script Prototyping and Modification

To ensure the resulting story is respectful to the original material and appropriate for public consumption, the script has undergone six stages of revisions based on feedback and consultations with supervising professors, friends who have experience in script writing and acting, and the storytellers themselves before being finalized.

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Stage 3: Prototyping 

 

Internal Prototyping

An internal rehearsal prototyping was held on 24/3/2023 for revising the existing problems such as blocking, runtime, practical problems, and wordings. Several inappropriate terms about psychology were replaced with proper expressions and stigmatizing words were deleted. The facing and set position were also re-adjusted, for more dynamic blocking to keep the show entertaining and movements were added to enhance engagement.

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External Prototyping

Two external rehearsal prototyping were held on 6/4/2023 and 14/4/2023 for revising the existing problems. Friends who are not very experienced in drama and not very knowledgeable in psychology were invited to participate and provide feedback afterward. Improvements and adjustments were then made according to the comments received.

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Stage 4: Promotion

 

To reach more audiences, different platforms for promoting the show have been adopted. Posters were put up on the CUHK campus and different social media, including Instagram and Whatsapp, were utilized for promotion. The project also collaborated with the psychology department and was able to send a mass email to all psychology students and invite them to see the show.

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Stage 5: Rehearsals

 

Rehearsals began in March, and the process involve developing the characters and workshopping the scenes with the actors. The rehearsals tally up to more than 70 hours and a regular run-through was held every Friday.

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Stage 6: Performance

 

A total of three shows were held, at 8 p.m. on the 19th and 20th of April, and at 3 p.m. on the 20th of April. The show was performed for free and a total of 202 audiences were recruited. After the afternoon show on the 20th of April, a post-performance discussion was also held, in which audiences were able to ask questions directly to the cast and director, further facilitating their understanding of the subject matter.

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Stage 7: Video Recording

 

Using equipment borrowed from the School of Journalism and Communication, a live recording of the show was taken and edited into a one-and-a-half-hour-long video. The video contains both Chinese and English subtitles to broaden the accessibility and increase the outreach of the project. The video is on the website or you can just click here to watch it.

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Stage 8: Data Collection

 

Two sets of pre- and post-questionnaires were conducted with Qualtrics. Convenience sampling was adopted for data collection. Pre-test data collection was done simultaneously with ticket registration. The number of pre-test participants was 208. The number of post-test participants was 176. Since the post-test data collection is carried out on a voluntary base, there was a 15% dropout rate of collecting the responses. WhatsApp messages were sent to participants 3 days after the show to increase the response rate.

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Stage 9: Data Analysis

The scales of the questionnaire were run through the reliability analysis. There were three sets of scales in both pre-test and post-test, “self-imposed stigmatization”, “public stigmatization” and “help-seeking tendency”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the pre-test scales were 0.703, 0.854, and 0.809 respectively. The alpha value of the post-test scales were 0.707, 0.862, and 0.739. As all the Cronbach’s alpha value is above 0.7, it could be concluded that these scales have high reliability and the results yielded are valid. The collected data was run through the paired samples T-test, in order to analyze the impact of the drama production. The p-value calculated from the “self-imposed stigmatization” scale is less than 0.001, the same goes for the “help-seeking tendency” scale, as for the “public stigmatization” scale, the p-value is found to be 0.003. All the p-values obtained are below 0.05, which indicates that the mean difference between the paired observations is significantly different from 0. These data show that the drama production “In the Depths of the Ocean” is effective in reducing self-imposed stigma against depression, raising awareness of public stigma against depression, and prompting audiences to be more inclined to seek help when they are experiencing emotional distress.