Understanding and addressing the stigma of mental illness with ethnic minority communities

Higher income societies have moved from institutional to community-based care for people experiencing mental illness. However, stigma and discrimination persists and undermines help-seeking, recovery and life chances. Mental illness prevalence is higher amongst communities that face multiple prejudices and disadvantages within society, including black and minority ethnic communities who may experience migration trauma, racism, acculturation and adverse social circumstances. This study examines beliefs, stigma and the effectiveness of existing national mental health campaigns with Pakistani, Indian and Chinese heritage communities in Scotland, UK, using community based participatory research. Community organisers were trained and supported to co-facilitate focus groups with eighty seven people using a range of languages. Whilst diversity within and between communities was apparent, important trends emerged. People with mental illness experience high levels of stigma from communities. Families experience significant associated stigma. This shame combines with culturally inappropriate services to reduce help seeking from mental health services, friends and families. Existing anti-stigma campaigns have failed to reach or engage with communities due to a combination of practical issues such as the use of inappropriate language, imagery and media, but also due to assuming western medical concepts of illness. Participants suggested a new model for national campaigns placing greater emphasis upon community development, cultural events, positive contact and dialogue with families, faith leaders and youth groups. National anti-stigma programmes must develop more effective partnerships with communities or risk magnifying existing inequalities

Understanding and Measuring Psychological Stress using Social Media

A body of literature has demonstrated that users' mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety, can be predicted from their social media language. There is still a gap in the scientific understanding of how psychological stress is expressed on social media. Stress is one of the primary underlying causes and correlates of chronic physical illnesses and mental health conditions. In this paper, we explore the language of psychological stress with a dataset of 601 social media users, who answered the Perceived Stress Scale questionnaire and also consented to share their Facebook and Twitter data. Firstly, we find that stressed users post about exhaustion, losing control, increased self-focus and physical pain as compared to posts about breakfast, family-time, and travel by users who are not stressed. Secondly, we find that Facebook language is more predictive of stress than Twitter language. Thirdly, we demonstrate how the language based models thus developed can be adapted and be scaled to measure county-level trends. Since county-level language is easily available on Twitter using the Streaming API, we explore multiple domain adaptation algorithms to adapt user-level Facebook models to Twitter language. We find that domain-adapted and scaled social media-based measurements of stress outperform sociodemographic variables (age, gender, race, education, and income), against ground-truth survey-based stress measurements, both at the user- and the county-level in the U.S. Twitter language that scores higher in stress is also predictive of poorer health, less access to facilities and lower socioeconomic status in counties. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of using social media as a new tool for monitoring stress levels of both individuals and counties.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of ICWSM 201

From blues to rainbows: the mental health and well-being of gender diverse and transgender young people in Australia

This study of gender diverse and transgender young people reveals high rates of depression, suicidal thoughts and anxiety. Introduction This report is the culmination of many months of engagement across Australia with young people aged between 14 and 25 who have shared their thoughts, understandings, experiences, hopes and dreams with us through an online survey and online interviews. Their narratives are insightful, touching, and hopeful. Young voices have told us how they care for themselves as well as shining a light on how health services, schools, government and policy makers can better serve their needs. This research was designed to expand on findings from previous Australian research with young people that found that gender-questioning and transgender young people not only experienced higher rates of self-harm and suicidal thoughts, but were also more likely to be involved in activism than their cisgender and same-sex attracted peers. This later finding is a potentially positive one and points to the need for research to not only explore the mental health needs of these young people but also the ways in which they advocate and care for themselves in the face of discrimination and abuse

Spartan Daily, November 21, 2017

Volume 149, Issue 38https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2017/1079/thumbnail.jp

A Foundation for Online Knowledge Mobilization in Child and Youth Mental Health: Synthesis Report

Navigating the online environment to find mental health can be a daunting task, especially for children and youth. Three research projects commissioned by the Mental Health Commission of Canada were summarized in this report. The projects sought insights into what children and youth want to know about mental health and how do they search for this information online. The summary report highlights a number of recommendations with opportunities for further action to reduce stigma and improve access to mental health information online.

Two Cognitive Obstacles to Preventing Child Abuse: The 'Other Mind' Mistake and the 'Family Bubble'

Following decades of effective publicity about the issue, Americans are now aware of the horrors of child abuse and have an idea (even an exaggerated idea) of the pervasiveness of all types of maltreatment. Making further headway in engaging the public on the issue will have to involve more than raising the volume on awareness campaigns. Such campaigns can even backfire by intensifying the public's media-fed association between abuse and sensational crimes -- which only "sick monsters" could commit and no programs can ever totally eliminate.To take the public to the next step in engagement, communications will need to address counterproductive patterns of reasoning that hinder better understanding of the issue. One of the most pervasive of these is the "Other-Minds" mistake: Lay people misperceive a child as a little mind which develops through abstract processes like learning, memory and choice; or which does not "develop" at all, and exists from the beginning as something like an adult mind which just needs to be "filled" or "guided." This fallacy effectively obscures any scientific understanding of development of biological systems which guide these and all other aspects of behavior. This fallacy is natural, we suggest, because of a highly evolved (and very useful) human mechanism for interpreting the content of Other-Minds (known to psychologists as the "Other-Minds module"). While the "Other-Minds" module is extremely useful for trying to read the minds of other adults, it also leads to a number of distortions that make child maltreatment more likely to happen, and less likely to be prevented. These distortions include a tendency to believe that an infant has an "agenda" that conflicts with ours; an exaggerated sense of children's ability to "get past" abuse through force of will; a sense that even one year-old children can benefit from punishment for breaking moral rules; and a difficulty understanding the concept of "neglect" except as something like "underinvolvement;" among others. An additional cognitive obstacle which communications need to address is the "Family Bubble" -- the default mode of thinking in which events within the family (including child rearing and child maltreatment) take place in a sphere that is separate and different from the public sphere. This default understanding is stronger than a mere belief that families should be autonomous. It means that even thinking about the interaction between child rearing and public policy is difficult for people, and that communications based on reinforcing the "Village," while appealing, can lead to conflictedness rather than change. This research analysis is part of New FrameWorks Research on Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention, and was conducted in collaboration with the FrameWorks Institute, and commissioned by Prevent Child Abuse America, with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

DCMS does science: highlights from the launch of the DCMS Science and Research Advisory Committee (SRAC)

"Based on the presentations, discussions and Q&A sessions during the SRAC launch event, this publication: highlights the key themes discussed by speakers and launch attendees; summarises the main points from the speakers’ presentations; and, outlines the SRAC’s next steps." - page 7

Try to be healthy, but don't forgo your masculinity: deconstructing men's health discourse in the media

The emergence of discourse around men’s health has been evident now for at least 10 years across academic, policy and media texts. However, recent research has begun to question some of the assumptions presented concerning masculinity and men’s health, particularly within popular media representations. The present paper builds on previous research by interrogating the construction of men’s health presented in a recent special feature of a UK national newspaper (The Observer, November 27, 2005). The dataset was subjected to intensive scrutiny using techniques from discourse analysis and several inter-related discursive patterns were identified which drew upon essentialist notions of masculinity, unquestioned differences between men and women, and constructions of men as naïve, passive and in need of dedicated help. The implications of such representations for health promotion are discussed

Characterizing Transgender Health Issues in Twitter

Although there are millions of transgender people in the world, a lack of information exists about their health issues. This issue has consequences for the medical field, which only has a nascent understanding of how to identify and meet this population's health-related needs. Social media sites like Twitter provide new opportunities for transgender people to overcome these barriers by sharing their personal health experiences. Our research employs a computational framework to collect tweets from self-identified transgender users, detect those that are health-related, and identify their information needs. This framework is significant because it provides a macro-scale perspective on an issue that lacks investigation at national or demographic levels. Our findings identified 54 distinct health-related topics that we grouped into 7 broader categories. Further, we found both linguistic and topical differences in the health-related information shared by transgender men (TM) as com-pared to transgender women (TW). These findings can help inform medical and policy-based strategies for health interventions within transgender communities. Also, our proposed approach can inform the development of computational strategies to identify the health-related information needs of other marginalized populations

Suicide Prevention & Response: A Comprehensive Resource Guide for Indiana Schools 2018

Document created for the Indiana Department of Education for Suicide Prevention and Response