One in five adults in the US experiences a mental health issue, but people seldom talk about these issues with a healthcare professional—let alone with family or friends. One Medical, a national network of primary care doctors’ offices, wanted to help normalize the conversation and encourage people facing mental health issues to speak out.

To encourage people to speak more openly about their mental health, One Medical teamed up with four-time-Grammy-winning songwriter Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd to create a song using lyrics drawn from hundreds of anonymous online posts about these issues.

To make the song, One Medical gathered hundreds of real, anonymous mental health posts from internet forums like Reddit and displayed them in the recording studio. The posts ranged from users facing thoughts such as hopelessness, apathy and even suicide to others urging positivity. Using these posts as lyrics, Poo Bear wrote the original song “Better Days.”

Our strategy was to reduce the stigma around mental health by showing just how many people face these issues, even if they don’t talk about them publicly. Our hope was to encourage more people to speak out, either to friends or to one of our doctors.

Knowing that a lot of pop artists were already being inspired by their personal mental health experiences, we decided that a song would give us the most credible platform to achieve this goal.

The full song played on Spotify, Apple Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Amazon Music and Tidal, as well as in the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices nationwide. Song clips promoting the project ran on streaming services, social media and national radio. Each placement drove traffic to the One Medical website, where people can book appointments with doctors.

Ads promoting the project ran from October 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019. The song is available permanently on streaming services.

The song moved the mental health conversation from the dark corners of the internet to the mainstream, reaching 4.5+ million people through organic sharing and 9+ million through paid media. Online visits increased by 20 percent, new patients were proactively screened for anxiety and depression, and 15,418 people opened up about these issues to doctors.