Hidden Healers is a first-of-its-kind digital video series that elevates, uplifts, and centers culturally grounded healing practices from BIPOC communities to show how healing can come from many unexpected places, including our own traditions and cultural practices.
MTV’s Hidden Healers campaign aims to empower young people from a diversity of backgrounds to embrace their own accessible and relevant hidden healing practices to help improve their mental health.
This digital series was created in partnership with four young leaders (Ayanna Kelly, Kheira Bekkadja, Maddox Guerilla and Mahmoud Khedr) who developed and presented the idea at MTV Entertainment’s Mental Health Youth Action Forum in May 2022, which was hosted at the White House alongside actor and activist Selena Gomez, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy.
The first of these digital videos was released in November as part of Native Peoples Heritage Month.The episode – called It’s TraDish – highlighted and honored traditional Native customs grounded in mental health healing. In this activity-based interview series, talent explores a tradition from their community, all while answering a wide variety of questions ranging from mental health and healing to pop culture.
Our strategy is to have a consistent drumbeat of new episodes tied to Heritage Months, the first being Native Peoples’ Heritage Month. We spearheaded the Mental Health Youth Action Forum to empower young people and help them to develop mental health content that would resonate with their communities and drive people to action. The Hidden Healers is a group of diverse innovators who bring awareness to attainable, affordable and inclusive methods of care, ultimately allowing everyone to envision themselves as people who can flourish.
When it comes to It’s TraDish, the goal was not only to support, uplift and inform our audience about the importance of taking care of ourselves mentally or how different communities are affected by the tribulations of the world, but to also inform ourselves. Through extending our video turn around times, we met with experts of the Native Peoples’ community to learn and understand the history of that community and their struggles. Change happens when we all have compassion and love for one another. Working with James Jones taught us there are many ways we can heal through traditions and dance.
The primary goal of the Hidden Healers campaign is to shed light on alternative healing practices that we can find in our own traditions and cultures, and to empower our audiences to take those actions as part of their daily mental health maintenance. Following the release of the first Hidden Healers video, we saw significant positive engagement from our audience, with many expressing gratitude for this type of content, and sharing that they felt inspired to share their own stories and mental health practices. The video was one of the top 20 posts on MTV’s channels in November, and was in the top three on MTV’s Tiktok for the month. This episode of It’s TraDish drove a total of 2.4M views, 47K engagements and 2.5M impressions across platforms.
We are proud to be able to share uplifting and empowering content with our audiences that help communities feel seen, while also helping others learn more about a range of mental health practices and customs. At the end of the video, we directed people to seek resources at Mental Health is Health, where they could find general mental health information as well as links to specific organizations, tools and hotlines to help our Native audience members find specialized support to help them along their mental health journeys. Thanks in part to this Hidden Healers video, our Mental Health is Health website saw a 100% increase in traffic during the month that Hidden Healers content was released.
