Although the war on diabetes was declared in a nationwide address by Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Long in 2017, disease has plagued the nation for a very long time. In 2015, it was reported by The Straits Times that Singapore was just second place to the United States in proportion of diabetics among developed nations. So why then has such a disease not only continue to grow, but at such a rapid rate?

I started by looking into how diabetes is formed. When food is consumed, the body breaks up carbohydrates and sugar into glucose. The pancreas produces insulin, a hormone that converts glucose into energy for the body cells or stores glucose as fat. Over time, excessive consumption of carbs and sugar can cause the body to stop responding to insulin or wear the pancreas out. This is known as insulin resistance, which causes an increase in glucose levels in the blood, resulting in diabetes.

Because of this, diabetes is a result of habits and lifestyle choices over time.

Looking at the current efforts such as the Let's Beat Diabetes campaign ongoing since 2016, I’ve realised that they are too keen to tell the audience what to do and not much attention was given to making the viewer feel about the disease. For me, it was not strong enough to move people to change their habits and lifestyles.

I took a look at other medical campaigns such as the ALS ice bucket challenge. While it was lauded for successfully raising awareness across the world with it's viral campaign in 2014, it has sadly become mostly forgotten today. In dealing with a disease that took time to develop, I felt that my approach to it needed to have a certain amount of longevity.

So what if we started to treat diabetes as a cultural thing, instead of a medical one?

Religion has been with us for many centuries and has played a huge role in the morals and ethics we are so familiar today. My initial research started at Har Paw Villa and led me to realise that many of the representations of hell in religious beliefs felt very similar to diabetes when left uncontrolled. To me, the different side effects of the disease mirrored the layers of hell in Chinese, Islamic and Hindu beliefs. The lack of a cure for the disease also mirrored beliefs where there was no reincarnation or eternal suffering. At this moment, it may seem to suggest that the work may end up as a full-on fear campaign, and I was very wary of that. But the demonisation of disease allows for a crusade against these demons, offering a hope or salvation for the audience.