International Approaches To Prevention In Mental Health And Human Services

Here is a new book devoted to prevention efforts outside of the United States. Chapters present prevention efforts from a variety of countries, including Costa Rica, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, and reflect the diversity in the cultures of the authors. Despite cultural differences, common themes emergemainly an orientation toward the community and a focus on empowerment. International Approaches to Prevention in Mental Health and Human Services increases knowledge of differences and similarities in prevention strategies from around the world and stimulates international relationships which can enrich the field of prevention for all.

This international survey defines mental health as a basic human right, and tracks the emergence of mental health prevention and promotion as a global priority. Locating mental illness within a cycle of negative causes and effects affecting human quality of life, the editors identify modern policy barriers to promotion/prevention initiatives, particularly the favoring of the biomedical health model by major stakeholders. The book’s selection of successful programs from diverse countries displays a lifespan approach, emphasizing the centrality of interdisciplinary educational settings in providing primary and secondary prevention and promotion interventions, and the ongoing fight against missing financial investigations, discrimination and stigma. Together, these papers make a forceful argument for rights- based responses to worldwide mental health needs as part of the commitment toward global human rights and long-term development goals. Included in the coverage: · Mental health priorities around the world. · Social determinants of mental health. · Mental health and stigma: aspects of anti-stigma interventions. · Promoting social and emotional wellbeing and responding to mental health problems in schools. · The promotion and delivery of mental health services in primary care settings. · Economic evaluation of mental health promotion and mental illness prevention. Bringing to the fore public health concerns that are too often marginalized, Global Mental Health is necessary reading for health professionals, health and clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists, and policymakers.

Program Implementation in Preventive Trials shows you how you can take a more active part in program evaluation and how you can direct existing programs toward new horizons of more effective service. In this concise, focused look at community-based psychology and its operative programs, you’ll see how and why community programs should be comprehensively evaluated. You’ll see the importance of understanding how interventions were conducted before making conclusions about a program’s impact, and you’ll discover why there’s an ever-widening gap between what is planned and what actually gets implemented in community-based programs. In short, Program Implementation in Preventive Trials helps you see the increasing need for the assessment of implementation, the “active” side of community psychology. You’ll gain instant understanding as to why there’s a need for constant monitoring of a program’s use, and you’ll find answers to the following questions that continue to plague community psychologists who are interested in implementing programs of change: Does the current personnel follow the implementation program? Will new members to the setting understand and utilize the procedures developed for that setting? Will the procedures be modified such that their utility decreases? Specifically, you’ll read about: how to ensure intervention programs are conducted as planned why implementation data should be collected what protocol compliance is and its role in treatment programs when to be flexible so modifications can be made in program procedures who can enhance program adherence by “buying in” to a multi-change agent approach where cultural sensitivity helps programs be more faithfully adopted and conducted If you’re a scholar or a student interested in studying the fundamental issue of implementation, you’ll definitely want to see what these professionals have compiled in Program Implementation in Preventive Trials. You’ll find that your program agenda, however beneficial it is now, will only be raised and elevated to a new level of performance by the positive examples and research carefully collected here.

This book provides a new generation of research in which scholars are investigating mental health and human development as not merely the absence of illness or dysfunction, but also the presence of subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is a fundamental facet of the quality of life. The quality of an individual’s life can be assessed externally and objectively or internally and subjectively. From an objective standpoint, other people measure and judge another’s life according to criteria such as wealth or income, educational attainment, occupational prestige, and health status or longevity. Nations, communities, or individuals who are wealthier, have more education, and live longer are considered to have higher quality of life or personal well-being. The subjective standpoint emerged during the 1950s as an important alternative to the objective approach to measuring individual’s well-being. Subjectively, individuals evaluate their own lives as evaluations made, in theory, after reviewing, summing, and weighing the substance of their lives in social context. Research has clearly shown that measures of subjective well-being, which are conceptualized as indicators of mental health (or ‘mental well-being’), are factorially distinct from but correlated with measures of symptoms of common mental disorders such as depression. Despite countless proclamations that health is not merely the absence of illness, there had been little or no empirical research to verify this assumption. Research now supports the hypothesis that health is not merely the absence of illness, it is also the presence of higher levels of subjective well-being. In turn, there is growing recognition of the personal and social utility of subjective well-being, both higher levels of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing. Increased subjective well-being has been linked with higher personal and social ‘goods’: higher business profits, more worker productivity, greater employee retention; increased protection against mortality; increased protection against the onset and increase of physical disability with aging; improved cognitive and immune system functioning; and increased levels of social capital such as civic responsibility, generativity, community involvement and volunteering. This edited volume brings together for the first time the growing scientific literature on positive mental health that is now being conducted in many countries other than the USA and provides students and scholars with an invaluable source for teaching and for generating new ideas for furthering this important line of research.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of current research, policy, and practice developments in promoting mental health and well-being. It offers guidance on developing and delivering mental health promotion interventions across a variety of settings internationally. Chapters outline key mental health promotion concepts, implementation processes, and outcomes through empirical findings, practical advice based on successful evidence-based approaches, and templates for action. In addition, chapters answer key “how” questions on practical implementation as well as the “whys”, providing rationales for mental health promotion and identifying the key factors and underlying principles that make these interventions work. The book includes examples of evidence-based practice with 17 case studies of innovative interventions from different international settings. These case studies illustrate the practical aspects of intervention development and delivery and the realities of implementing policies and programes outside of controlled research conditions. Topics featured in this book include: · Interventions that promote gender equality. · Community empowerment models of mental health promotion. · Mental health promotion in the home for children and parents. · Promoting social and emotional learning in schools. · Addressing stress and promoting mentally healthy workplaces. · Mental health promotion within primary health care. · Re-orienting mental health services to mental health promotion for service users and caregivers. Implementing Mental Health Promotion, Second Edition, is a must-have resource for researchers, clinicians and related professionals, and policymakers as well as graduate students across such interrelated disciplines as health promotion, public health, child and school psychology, social work, clinical psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, health psychology, educational policy and practice, school nursing, occupational therapy, school counseling, and family studies.

Growing out of an interest in exploring the contemporary contexts and practices related to mental health social work across the world, this book provides a range of insights into the social factors which contribute, sometimes quite significantly, to the emergence of mental health problems for individuals and even whole communities. The range and scope of mental health social work is highlighted through the different accounts of therapeutic work, advocacy, support and rehabilitation. But this collection goes further and also provides the reader with critical analyses of social work practice and social policies in certain contexts, thus inviting the reader to a more reflective consideration of the value of mental health perspectives in social work in general. Taken as a whole, the collection suggests that social work engages with the field of mental health in diverse, creative, and very reflective ways, yet is always focused on the needs and rights of those for whom problems with mental health can be personally challenging and often disempowering. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.