I think it was the year I took a childhood friend to the CAMH emergency room that I saw my first “Bell Let’s Talk” billboard. It was a photo of Howie Mandel cheerily looking at a smartphone with accompanying copy that said: “Let’s Turn that *frowny-face emoji* into *smiley-face emoji*.”

The telecom giant’s mental health awareness advertisements have since become less egregiously tone-deaf — I bet they got an earful about that emoji train wreck — but, for many of those most impacted by mental health they’re still out of touch.

Take this year’s campaign: billboards with photos of well-groomed people — mostly white — alongside text reading “Mental Health Affects Us All.”

True. Mental health does affect us all. But it affects some people — and groups of people — far more than others. Bipolar disorder is no less painful for sufferers and their loved ones who happen to be white and well-off than those who aren’t, but if you don’t have money and already have racial stigmas stacked against you, it’s a whole lot harder to access effective help — and a whole lot harder to get relief from your suffering.

Perhaps this is somehow what Bell is trying to get at with that “it affects us all” tag line. Perhaps they are trying to reduce stigma by messaging that speaks primarily to the white and economically comfortable — messaging that shows them non-threatening images of mental illness.

If so, it’s an understandable method, but one with consequences for those who don’t fit into that target audience — consequences for people struggling with their mental health.

While the actual “Let’s Talk” day has done a lot of good, allowing many people to feel they can speak about things they used to suffer in silence, for many other sufferers, the advertising associated with that day can make them, us, feel more alone.

During the worst years of my own mental health struggles — rough, often debilitating years — I’d dread the annual Bell mental-health-themed advertising blitz. Because that’s how it seemed: like advertising for a corporation dripping in the money desperately needed by many of those suffering from mental illness, with genuine concern for mental health sufferers a distant second.

Other sufferers I knew felt the same way. We talked about how those shiny ads were one more thing to bear through during an already very tough time; one more thing that made it hard to leave the house and engage with the world; one more thing that made us feel alone in a world that seemed more functional and smooth than we thought we would ever be.

I can only imagine how much greater that sense of alienation is for those battling severe poverty and racism as well as mental health conditions — how looking up at those billboards of neat white people must add to the feeling that is reinforced daily by so many other social structures: that this world is not for them.

Because the reality of mental illness is far from anything that would be approved in a boardroom. It is not clean or clear or pretty; it does not follow a definably upward trajectory. It is messy, ugly, and sad; it often gets much worse before it gets better; when it does get better it never really goes away; and when it is combined with poverty and racism it can become intractable.

This is often the face of mental health in this country — a face that is nowhere close to those smooth, sanitized, overwhelmingly white billboards that look like they’ve been processed out of reality by teams of highly paid marketing consultants.

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You want to have a real talk about mental health, Bell Canada? Then, with all due respect for the genuine good of the “Let’s Talk” day, please shut up. Turn down the volume on your logo and focus in on using your substantial financial resources and massive communications infrastructure to raise up voices that are usually silenced.

Let’s see more of things like this year’s In Their Own Words special and less of corporate dollars poured into marketing blitzes, which can make the most marginalized feel more alone.