How Live Storytelling Is Helping People Cope With Mental Illness

Heather Bodie is the executive artistic director at an organization that uses live reenactment to start discussions on topics about mental health.

Live storytelling is an emotionally powerful medium, and one organization in Chicago is using it to get more people to talk about mental health. 

Heather Bodie is the executive artistic director of erasing the distance, a non-profit arts organization started in 2005 that uses live storytelling to foster community discussions about topics like alcoholism, depression, anxiety and PTSD.   

"You'll notice, even in the last like five years, billboards on the side of the highway or signs on the side of the bus that say 'talk to someone,' right? But if you've never placed language to what it is that you're living with, to what it is that's going on in your body, if you have deep seated stigma and shame around what it means to live with a mental health issue or to be going through crisis, you go sit down and talk to someone, but what are you going to say?" said Bodie. "The stories are performed by professional actors. But the way it works is that people sit down with us and share their own experiences in one-on-one interview style setting for anywhere from like an hour and a half to two hours, we transcribe those interviews, and then shape them verbatim text into two page scripts that we hand to those actors."