Mental Health Promotion Essay

Many strategies can contribute to young people’s mental health promotion based on literacy review and blog findings.
First, building healthy public policy is essential as health promotion goes beyond a focus on individuals. Promoting mental health requires assessing the health of targeting population and providing assurance for health care. Social policies, such as reducing poverty and financial stress of families are the key issues for preventing mental and behavioral disorders among young people. Policy makers may invite health institution or agency to participate in national projects, thereby developing new policy to improve practice in the mental health field.
Second, developing personal skills and strengthening family can act as a buffer against adversity and psychological disorders. Building individual resilience may include building hope, coping, optimism, and promoting interpersonal skills. This aims to enhance the capacity of

achieving sense of self esteem, mastery, well-being, and social interaction. Strengthening family is equally important because strong, healthy family support function as mediators of positive outcomes and can reduce the risks of mental health problems.
Last but not least, creating supportive environment is the most important strategy for mental health promotion. This approach must be a wide-ranging effort that includes health professionals, organizations or agencies, communities and the media. Being a centre for mental health education and training, health institution or agency may initiate some education program targeting on young people, for example, short course or workshops on mental health issue to increases the individual’s capacity to make informed healthy choices. These programs provide knowledge of risk factors for mental health disorders, the coping skills, and the availability of health and other support services. They may collaborate with other available supportive groups to increase the public awareness by translating the relevant research findings in simple way, and transmitting them to public through media such as blogs (that is what we do now), website, and newspapers. Another important support is to strengthen community action. Such action may involve the schools curriculum resources, recruiting people to advocacy in the community.
Creating supportive environment is considered as the key strategy to address the issue of promoting mental health for the youth.

Our project aims to engage young people in promoting mental health from a primary prevention perspective. Supportive environment helps available professionals such as doctors, nurses, teachers and journalists to recognize and respond to the early signs of mental illness with evidence-based strategies and the capacity to deliver effective interventions. Their targeted mental health promotion programs increase the knowledge and skills of young people who are under situational stress. The common goal of mental health promotion for young people is to create healthy, safe, supportive environments to promote their personal well-being, satisfying family and interpersonal relationships, and positive contributions to community or society. Therefore, mental health promotion for young people has required not only building healthy policy, and individual resilience, but also more than creating supportive

environment.