Announcing the Unshame Pain Video Project

The Unshame Pain Project aims to increase compassion and change harmful attitudes about pain through five 4-8 minute documentary style videos.

The objectives are:

• Expand perspectives and supply actionable tools people can use to sensitively respond to people in pain
• Make visible the stories of people in pain, especially the underrepresented

The Unshame Pain videos will put real faces to pain conditions to promote understanding, stop stigmatization of people in pain, spark dialogs and popularize non-shaming pain support. The videos will encompass how pain is experienced anatomically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually by featuring people with chronic pain, fibromyalgia, intersex conditions, depression and mood conditions, PTSD, neurodivergentl/atypical processing, and other chronic illnesses and/or disabilities.The videos will compel viewers to think in new ways about the many dimensions of pain, including:

• Pain as a social justice issue
• How to acknowledge and respond to a person in pain
• Why persistent pain debilitates: multidimensionality of pain
• How to be a pain-friendly support person and ally

The free videos will be publicized via social media, blogs, chronic illness websites, in community forums and in presentations to medical/health professionals. A longer version of the video will be created to submit to film festivals. The Unshame Pain videos are part of a broader mission to promote dialogues to change how we think about the social, political and personal dimensions of pain.Interviewees of different racial, ethnic, economic, age, and dis/ability backgrounds, including people who are queer and people of multiple gender expressions/identities, as well as fat people/people of size are already committed. This grassroots project is created by and will be crewed by people with disabilities.About Ma'ayan Simon:Unshaming Pain is my life's work: I developed disabling musculoskeletal pain and autoimmune diseases as a teenager. I am pursuing my Pain Activism & Education mission by writing and teaching about pain as a social justice issue. My background is in nonprofit grassroots development strategies, communications and coalition building with a focus on queer, transgender, intersex, disability and intersectional activism.About Shanon Okay, Okay Production:Shanon is a videographer who lives with Fibromyalgia, Depression, Anxiety, Cognitive Disability, and Chronic Fatigue. Shanon’s experience includes over 15 years in photographic and video formatting and she holds a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute.I'd love to hear what you think: leave me a comment or Contact Me.