Week 1 - Some thoughts about Mental Health, from Public Health

Hi I'm Logan and this blog will be used for tasks related to the class ADED1P32 Learning in Digital Contexts. I have never done an online course before, so this may be a little challenging for me to adapt to at first. I will include links, images as well as videos in some of my posts, and hope that you will thoroughly enjoy reading what content I will produce here. I hope to learn about different information systems and tools used today to further my personal skill sets for the working world. I hope also to learn more about social media to adapt to the Health Promotion aspect of what I study: Public Health.

There may not be any other Public Health students in this class. So perhaps I should give a little introduction to Public Health as well as the importance of some concepts, if you are interested. Here are a few thoughts I have in regards to Mental Health:

I have learned throughout the years that Public Health is about prevention of disease as opposed to treatment. While developing health services to treat and take care of those in need is morally attractive, I believe that building a strong internal individual resiliency and capacity starting in early childhood deserves more resource allocation in the future of preventive healthcare. I believe it is much more cost effective and beneficial to society to work with young children and youth to prevent substance-related disorders, for example, as opposed to  as opposed to bearing the cost of treating a thousand people over a decade . If left to the latter option, the need for resources to take care of mental health issues will exponentially increase in comparison to the limited resources available over time.

Last year, I learned that about 50% of Canadian youth have used marijuana by 10th grade, as well as having had at least two serious alcohol over-consumption. However, in the case of people I have known that went to a boarding school, an introduction to addictive substances at such a young age was unheard of due to the remote location and the unavailability of these addictive substances. Perhaps future research needs to focus on modifying the setting of everyday life for young children and youth. We need to learn how to better prepare all population of the future to be resilient and protected from well-known addictive substances known to lead to serious mental health issues.

I feel that media today portrays everything in a way that puts responsibility on everyone else except oneself. By accepting that mental illnesses are the result of biological causes or lack of social support, are we then negating individual responsibility, and therefore reducing a person’s own need to develop individual ability and capacity to cope? A man who has to work for everything in life growing up will have better ability to do it than someone who has been handed everything their whole life.

Public Health policies are often created based on available objectionable data. Yet when it comes to mental health, there appears to be two different measurements: the signs and symptoms identified by the training and textbook respectively, which we can observe or measure during a person’s mental health evaluation. Some of my class readings touched upon the fact that citizens can also evaluate their own well-being.

So which type of measurement should be a standard in Public Health? Would it be what health professionals believe, or what an individual believes? This may be related to the pain scales that medical professionals use to gauge how much pain an individual feels compared to the worst pain they have ever experienced. I think that in Public Health, we need to create standards and policies governing the different ways data is reported to take these factors into account.