RUA: Health Promotion Project TOPIC:

Running Head: MENTAL HEALTH 1

MENTAL HEALTH 7

Mental Health

Jane Uhunamure

Chamberlain University College of Nursing

NR222: Health and Wellness

Prof Neelum Jalil

August 6, 2020.

Health promotion involves a social science based on psychological, medical, biological, environmental, and physical sciences that boost health while preventing disability, premature death, and diseases through voluntary education-driven strategies that change behavior. Mental health promotion fosters a person’s resources competencies and strengths in both psychological and community aspects to reduce mental disorders and enhance the quality and well-being of life. The group focused mostly was the white Americans between 18 to 25 years. Whites have a higher chance of accessing and receiving services compared to other ethnicities. They receive quality and affordable care. The young white adults are more vulnerable to mental issues and require a broad basis on health promotion.

The burden of solving mental illness among the white young adults is considered as the highest of the common diseases (Sharma & Branscum 2020). Mental disorders are the most senior sources of disability. Recent statistics suggest a mental disorder faced about one out of four adults in the U.S in their past years. The most common illnesses among the population were depression and anxiety. The same statistics suggest that one out of seventeen young adults had a severe mental disorder. This rate is alarming as it is becoming common for an individual to have above a single mental health illness. Through advocacy, mediating, and enabling individuals can be enlightened on health promotion strategies to maintain these effects.

Mental health disorder is common to healthy people in 2020. Mental illnesses have a significant effect on physical health and are linked to progression, outcome, and prevalence outcomes of current diseases like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Mental illnesses are considered harmful and can result in long-term effects and high economic and psychosocial costs. This does not affect only individuals suffering from the disorders but also communities, families, workplaces, and schools.

Different articles have addressed positive mental health promotion and how it affects an individual's quality of life and well-being and contributes to the economy and society through increasing social capital and social functioning. Seaton et al., 2017 say that the measures of health promotion risk factors are aggregated to individuals’ character within a population. Consideration is often a binary link between different environmental factors and a person’s health. The ability of social capital is within its potential and understanding of the environment from different perspectives. The perception of networking and how people interact within an environment explains the disposition of different outcomes above the individual’s mental health outcomes. For example, people can be empowered towards improving or changing health conditions. The subpopulations face high chances of mental disorders concerning the environment.

According to Adams et al., 2018, mental health is an essential part of understanding the general well-being and health and, in a broader sense, reveals the equilibrium of the environment and individuals. The inability to pass positive mental health promotion, mental disorders, and mental health problems are not sure about any groups and regions, societies, and resources. Lack of healthcare, poor education, food, shelter, and water are the leading causes of mental health in this group. The purpose of mental health advancement is to focus on and target the whole population as it aims to achieve and enable positive mental health.

Evidence obtained from a systematic review by Barry et al., 2019, in health promotion and interventions reveals that positive long-term results on different aspects of functioning lead to outcomes that boost mental health, reduce mental illness risks, and improve the economic and social benefits. For example, increasing the affordability and availability of required resourcing and providing support to the target group. They provide a framework to improve health in populations in a holistic way while tackling positive health determinants but in different states. Mental health promotion is based on the Ottawa Charter's fundamental principles that promote the efficacy of health promotion. The Ottawa Charter consists of systematic levels that include; systematic reviews, randomized controlled trials (RTCs), quasi-experimental, and assessment of the process.

Mental health promotion approaches and strategies are used to increase awareness and maximize young white adults' ability to contract mental illnesses. The mental promotion approach is to increase the understanding of mental health problems while reducing discrimination and stigma to encourage people to seek help whenever they require.

The behavioral or lifestyle approach is concerned with young adults whose social or behavioral situations risk acquiring an unhealthy kind of lifestyle. This approach mainly targets smaller groups of individuals at risk within the community to alter their behavior. It is based on the theory that changing a certain percentage of a population's behavior leads to significantly larger groups changing their lifestyle (Jenkins, 2019). The approach is directed to altering the mental health withing groups that have risked their health in ways like smoking, misuse of substances, poor nutrition, and physical reluctance. The approach applies to the use of social marketing and health education to create awareness.

Another approach is the individual lifestyle approach that focuses on the principles that mental health promotion faces challenges of mortality and morbidity within young white adults (Jenkins 2019). The approach blames people for having poor mental health. It presumes that having the required information can lead to an individual changing their actions and manner of thinking to boost their mental health. However, the approach does not provide clear explanations as to why individuals choose unwise mental health choices and later fails to identify the factor which influences their behavior, such as smoking.

The socio-environmental approach of mental health promotion addresses social health determinants like housing, food, employment, and income and factors such as isolation, addiction, and experience at early life stages (Jenkins 2019). This approach applies strategies such as creating a quality environment to promote health, areas that can protect staff or students, working adequately with communities to build development, advocating for public policy and nutrition policies. Other approaches include the harm-minimization that focuses on reducing adverse consequences, and the zero-tolerance approach focuses on creating strict measures. A preventive medical approach that involves traditional approaches and the public health approach is concerned with minimizing injury and diseases (Jenkins, 2019. The different approaches use strategies of solving (Arango et al., 2018) their enabling issues, creating appropriate environments, and advocating for essential health conditions to promote mental health.

The mainstream mental health promotion is receiving great attention from various aspects, such as de-stigmatization awareness targeted in communities. Such efforts are essential and should be expanded, consolidated, and complemented through promotional activities that target certain population groups. Different agencies and bodies should broaden mental health promotion by applying different approaches to target strategies to increase and improve control over mental health. Health promotion at large should focus on equity and promote aims that reduce differences in health status to enable people to achieve great health potential.

References

Arango, C., Díaz-Caneja, C. M., McGorry, P. D., Rapoport, J., Sommer, I. E., Vorstman, J. A., ... & Carpenter, W. (2018). Preventive strategies for mental health. The Lancet Psychiatry, 5(7), 591-604.

Barry, M. M., Clarke, A. M., Petersen, I., & Jenkins, R. (Eds.). (2019). Implementing mental health promotion. Springer Nature.

Jenkins, R. (2019). Implementing Mental Health Promotion Approaches in Mental Health Services. In Implementing Mental Health Promotion (pp. 533-562). Springer, Cham.

O’Reilly, M., Svirydzenka, N., Adams, S., & Dogra, N. (2018). Review of mental health promotion interventions in schools. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 53(7), 647-662.

Seaton, C. L., Bottorff, J. L., Jones-Bricker, M., Oliffe, J. L., DeLeenheer, D., & Medhurst, K. (2017). Men’s mental health promotion interventions: A scoping review. American journal of men's health, 11(6), 1823-1837.

Sharma, M., & Branscum, P. (2020). Foundations of mental health promotion. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.