Snakes and Ladders is a game where luck decides whether you climb or fall. Scarborough just turned that board into a wall.
A new mural went up in the seaside town's Old Town neighborhood this week, unveiled Saturday, July 4, according to The Scarborough News. It was built by artists Mary Naylor and Bobby Hick, working with community groups organized by Sparks Project, a local charity that runs crisis and mental health support out of Scarborough's Barrowcliff and Eastfield neighborhoods.
The board game is the whole metaphor
The mural uses the Snakes and Ladders format directly. Ladders lift a figure up. Snakes drag one back down. Squares stand in for the setbacks and small wins that make up living with a mental health crisis. Naylor described the piece as a way to capture "the mess, beauty and all that lies between our social epidemic of mental health," according to The Scarborough News.
The mural does not lecture. It does not print a hotline number in stock lettering across the top. It puts the mechanics of luck and setback on a wall people pass on the way to the harbor, and lets the board game do the talking.
The charity behind it already has a full waiting list
Sparks Project offers crisis support, counselling, and suicide prevention work out of two of Scarborough's poorer neighborhoods. The charity recently expanded its counselling services after new funding and partnerships, but staff say they are still running a full waiting list against demand that keeps growing, according to The Scarborough News.
That is the context the mural sits inside. A charity that cannot see everyone who needs it fast enough just put its subject matter on a public wall instead of behind an office door.
Old Town gets the message first
Scarborough's Old Town is the oldest part of the seaside resort, a knot of narrow streets between the harbor and the cliffs. Putting the mural there means it lands on tourists and locals both, in a town that runs on summer visitors and spends the rest of the year dealing with the same struggles the mural is about.
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