Providing comprehensive mental health care is the way to improve indicators of life condition, well-being, and development in individuals and communities. To achieve this, the participation of institutions and communities is required to allow a set of complementary and effective coordinated actions where the multidimensional nature of development is recognized, and management is inclusive.
The educational strategy is one of the essential parts of any project that affects how people grow and change throughout their lives. It lets us ensure that the activities we do for promotion and prevention improve people’s mental health and help their families and communities as we want them to.
Within the educational strategy, it is proposed that children, adolescents, teachers, and families recognize the paths of comprehensive care, the institutions that make it up, their role, and when to go, guaranteeing the necessary conditions for access to care or interventions, with which it is possible to enhance the capacities promoting individual and collective well-being.
Carrying out a diagnosis of the mental health situation of the population of the educational institutions of the Department of Quindo is essential to illustrating in a structured way the strengths and weaknesses of the programs, projects, strategies, and services that have been implemented.
Another of the educational actions is to publicize the hotline services, from which help services, psychosocial intervention, and support in crises will be provided, with a strategy of promoting the hotline in all educational institutions and teaching how to use the psychosocial hotline. The types of needs that need to be covered are:
- Information on the operation of the psychosocial hotline
- Enhancement of capacities in children and their families
- Teleconferences with specialists in mental health issues
- psychological counseling
- crisis care
- Situations of risk, harassment, or violation of rights.
- family problems
- Support in the management of families with mental and behavioral disorders
- labor problems
- academic difficulties
- parenting guidelines
- SPA consumption
- sexual abuse
- Cutting
- orientation in sexuality
- depression
- anxiety
- Suicidal ideation and attempted suicidal act
- stress
- Panic attacks
- child exploitation
- negligence
- abandonment
- dueling
- Violence through ICTs
- Alterations in eating behavior
- school violence
- Referrals to other designated agencies or institutions
The mental health promotion activities carried out in the institutions take into account all those involved in the educational system, both children and adolescents, teachers, and families, with the appropriate strategies for each one of them that will have components of:
- Prevention
- Promotion
- Education
The will of educational institutions is required to achieve the continuity of the processes, taking into account that the hotline is a social value service that allows for the maintenance of well-being and, from where health is promoted, helps to choose options and make decisions. Healthier for mental health.
Each service will be carried out by personnel with a professional level corresponding to the need for the intervention, who are trained, and permanently updated. There will be a description of each patient and a permanent record of the care statistics, quality metrics, and service levels of the interventions. This allows for detailed follow-up and provides contrasting real-time information that will help trace how they are treated. Find mental health in educational institutions and their environments. Supervision protocols will be executed to guarantee the quality of care.
It is necessary to generate changes through complementary and effective coordinated actions that offer specialization, immediacy, and better attention to the population.
Our objectives are:
- Development of activities in Education aimed at the maintenance and prevention of mental health
- Design of strategies in Education aimed at promoting mental health and social coexistence
- Implementation and start-up of activities oriented to EDUCATION
- Give the possibility of options by educating the population on the different offers of care and psychosocial intervention to promote individual and collective well-being.
Our questions for you are:
- How many educational institutions have a psychologist?
- What plans, programs, projects, and strategies in promoting mental health for your students, families, and teachers have you had access to? Which ones have you used, and what have been their experiences?
What Is The Awareness Of Mental Health?
Mental Health Is Health.
Released in 2022, the World Mental Health Report ( WHO report ) highlights why and where change is most needed and how it can best be achieved. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says: “Investment in mental health is an investment in a better life and future for all.” For these reasons, the theme of this year’s World Mental Health Day is to make access to mental health and well-being a priority worldwide. For the WHO, this is a right and means much more than the absence of mental disorders.
According to the definition of WHO: “mental health is a state of mental well-being that enables people to deal with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn and work well, and contribute to their community.” It is a facet of health and well-being that underpins our individual and collective abilities to make decisions, build relationships, and shape our world. Mental health is a fundamental human right and is crucial for personal, community, and socioeconomic development “.
Against all the stigma created after centuries of attention only to physical health, visible and therefore easier to treat, the WHO declares that there is no separation between physical health and mental health: both are part of human well-being. “We have a tradition that has been demystified that there is a reality of the body and there is a reality of the mind. This separation does not correspond to reality, it is done for convenience. When we talk about mental health, we talk about health, full stop. It has been proven that there are issues that we thought were of a physical nature that, in reality, are induced by thought”, says Paulo Carvalho.
The pillars of well-being
Regarding wellness, Awareness is the key word. Awareness of an emotional and cognitive system, its importance to human health, and Awareness of the telltale signs of imbalance. Paulo Carvalho identifies three fundamental pillars to pay attention to the relationship with others, self-esteem, and the existence of spaces to free the brain from command.
First, it is important to “recognize that we are social and emotional beings.” The feeling of loneliness and isolation is worrying; on the other hand, self-esteem works “as a kind of thermometer of our emotional well-being. Low self-esteem can be a worrying sign, hence the importance of being in an environment that values us.”
A third pillar, highly motivated by the current social organization, deals with the balance between high-performance activities, which demand productivity and high levels of attention from the brain (work), and others “in which thought does not dominate what happens in our system.” These activities can be found in times like sports or mindfulness.
It is from the Awareness of what is good for us as individuals and the ability to explore the signs that something is wrong with us that we can build “collective mental health.”
Go beyond the transactional relationship.
“In a professional context, we favor a fundamentally transactional relationship,” says Paulo Carvalho, referring to relationships between two people that are defined by an interest in an exchange: someone interacts with another because they want something of theirs, and vice versa. However, this type of relationship does not create an emotionally positive environment.
It is critical to understand that there is no clear line between personal and professional life. “This separation is just an illusion, it is an effort that is challenging and that is not safe from a psychological point of view. If I have a concern, I will have it all day”, explains Paulo Carvalho. Emotions generate reactions: anger makes some people speak up, and want to argue, even if it is a feeling that has nothing to do with the situation in which they yell at someone, for example. Making these emotions visible is a healthy way to understand and manage the reactions collectively they can generate. It is the way to make everyone visible.
