Medical student creates and sells NFT to promote and help Mental Health awareness.
“The artwork is more just how I express my own experiences with mental health,” said Carmen Aguirre.
The medical profession in itself is something to take pride in as medical professionals play an important role in society. Here Carmen Aguirre, a medical student at the University of Minnesota Medical School has taken it to another level.
On top of being a medical student, Carmen Aguirre is also a video jockey but what really stands out is that Carmen has been making NFTs over the past years to promote mental health awareness. The artwork created by her includes unique NFTs that depict mental illness.
Carmen Aguirre, known by her artist name Neurite has created many animation projects based on the theme of mental health. One of her creations includes “Emotion Monsters” which depict different emotions with different monsters.
Carmen said that this project was with the goal to make people more comfortable talking about their mental state and their emotions.
With the central theme of her artwork, mental health awareness, and support, Aguirre’s influence began to grow even further. She began promoting her NFT by starting conversations on Clubhouse, an application that allows users to join chat rooms and participate in live discussions.
A portion of the sales from the NFTs sold by Carmen Aguirre went to supporting health, education, and research at the University of Minnesota Medical School. She estimates that she has made around $ 10,000 in sales so far. Aguirre sells her work as prints and as non-fungible tokens or NFTs. 10% of her proceeds will be donated to The Mind Deconstructed, a podcast from the University of Minnesota on mental health.
“I would really like to integrate the idea of art therapy into the work I do, especially if I go into pediatric neurology,” Carmen Aguirre said.
Carmen wants to pursue pediatric neurology in the future and intends to use the rest of the money to create a children’s book about mental health.
Such innovations in the field of art and making use of new trends like NFT to support a social cause is applaudable. Mental health has been degrading at a greater rate now because of the pandemic yet somehow it gets neglected. But it needs to be taken care of and be handled on time and steps being taken by artists like Carmen Aguirre are really a way to look forward to a brighter picture.
