City council committee works out city-wide mental health campaign

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — City Councilman Terrance Freeman is working on fleshing out the city’s mental health campaign whose funds have already been established.

Last year, City Council asserted that $200,000 would go directly for a city-wide mental health awareness campaign. Freeman has since found an organization who would help with the campaign.

Hearts 4 Minds, a Jacksonville volunteer-organization that aims to destigmatize mental illness. The President, Sheryl Johnson, lost her son to suicide more than three years ago.

“We kept his battle quiet. There is a strong societal and self stigmatization that’s associated with mental illness and that creates one of the largest barriers to care,” Johnson said.

Since her son’s death, she formed Hearts 4 Minds, and now speaks on many City Council forums to bring the awareness to mental health.

“The goal of a campaign is to bring the community together to help understand that mental illness is a family and a community problem and we need to make it real and personal. We need to translate it from something that most people believe happens to ‘them’ or ‘those people’ to something that happens to all of us,” Johnson told the City Council committee. “We need to elevate it so that we understand that your mental health and your physical health are the foundation of a healthy and successful life. And when one of those isn’t working, it is really hard to sustain a long term, healthy life. We all know the numbers. Mental illness is an epidemic, but making it a silent and stigmatized epidemic is creating conflict and difficulty in making change.”

The campaign will kick off with a mural outside the Jumbo Shrimp Baseball Stadium of the organization’s signature dragonfly - a symbol of transformation, change, and adaptability. The mural would feature QR codes that people can scan with their phones. That QR code will go to a web page that has resources for people dealing with mental health. This would include resources and services for both insured and uninsured people. There would also be resources for people who knows someone with mental illness and how to get help being that support system.

They would then move into the social media realm, student and school groups, and promote the mental health campaigns through the City. Freeman says this campaign isn’t targeted to anyone directly, rather it’s for everyone in the city.

“This issue is one that has no respect of person or zip codes,” Freeman said. “So if there was ever a discussion about where we’re targeting this message, my response will be to our city.”

In 2019, 177 people died by suicide in Duval County.

The legislation for City Council would approve Hearts 4 Minds as the contractor to organize the campaign. If this contract passes City Council, the campaign would last for three years. The city would pay Hearts 4 Minds an initial payment of $50,000 to be used toward initial “start-up” costs for the services and then the City will pay in quarterly installments of up to $25,000 each for the third and fourth quarters of the first year of the term and quarterly installments of up to $12,500 each during the second and third years.

Cox Media Group