STORYBOARD / CONCEPT

The title of this project, "The Unsorted Hat," refers to the buried and unsorted traumatic memories of people afflicted with Complex PTSD (C-PTSD). Because it is difficult to process deeply buried memories and let them go, people with C-PTSD tend to have intrusive thoughts that are tied to any of the 5 senses instead of full-fledged cinematic flashbacks. Because C-PTSD flashbacks/dissociation are more abstract and live inside the mind, it is difficult to externalize them or even express how one is feeling when these intrusive thoughts occur. This hat uses sound as an outlet for these intrusive thoughts. When it detects that the room has become too quiet, it plays a snippet of a caustic mental rant on loop until the room fills with noise again. This intervention externalizes how C-PTSD survivors have to cope with these thoughts by bringing them aurally to the surface and disrupting an outside environment.