Mental Health Literacy

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NASW (2008) has identified universal access to health and mental health care as one of social work’s top priorities. National and international initiatives to improve health literacy among the general public are congruent with NASW’s goal. Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand health information and services that are needed to make appropriate health decisions (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS], 2000). Low levels of health literacy contribute to worse health outcomes, including increased incidence of chronic illness and less than optimal use of preventive services; yet interventions to address low literacy show promise for improving individual health and receipt …show more content…

The lack of focus on mental health literacy presents a serious shortcoming in health literacy efforts, as current estimates reveal that mental health disorders are highly prevalent in the United States, with more than a quarter (26.2 percent) of the adult population and approximately 13 percent (13.1 percent) of children reporting a diagnosable mental health disorder in a given year (Kessler, Chiu, Demler, & Walters, 2005;Merikangas et al., 2010). In addition, recent research has identified the reciprocal relationship between mind and body in achieving optimal health (Druss & Walker, 2011), indicating that health literacy efforts cannot fully achieve their aims without greater inclusion of mental health literacy. On the basis …show more content…

Mental health literacy includes the ability to recognize disorders and obtain mental health information; knowledge of risk factors, causes, self-treatments, and professional help; and attitudes that promote recognition and appropriate help seeking (Jorm et al., 1997). Jorm et al.’s (1997) earliest survey of Australian adults in the general public revealed low levels of mental health literacy, which triggered a call by Jorm et al. for efforts to raise public levels of mental health literacy to increase mental health disorder recognition and improve treatment usage. U.S. studies have had similar findings, with only 58 percent of adults demonstrating the ability to recognize a child with depression (Pescosolido et al., 2008) and less than half of adolescents in one study correctly identifying depression (42.4 percent) or anxiety (27.5 percent) (Olsson & Kennedy, 2010). Even young adults currently enrolled in college had a recognition rate of less than 50 percent for certain anxiety disorders in a recent survey (Coles & Coleman, 2010). The surgeon general (U.S. Public Health Service, 2001)has sought to reduce the discrepancy between those needing and actually

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