Auburn Mental Health Promotional Strategy

Mental Health Issues in Auburn

Health promotion program is series of actions to encourage good health and wellbeing. Spreading consciousness about good health and wellbeing is a part of such promotional actions that includes enlightening people with the ways to stay fit and healthy. Promotion of practices and values that influences a community about good health is also a part of health promotional program (Eldredge et al., 2016).

According to the World Health Organization’s report about mental health, around 450 million of people across the world is suffering from mental illness and the maximum of the population is below the age of 35. Treatments for these disorders are available, but approximately two-thirds of individuals with an identified mental disorder never look for help from a health professional (Kessler et al., 2013). Shame, discrimination and negligence inhibit care and treatment from reaching people with mental disorders. Australia is suffering from these mental disorders as well. 27 percent of young Australians are getting affected with mental illness. However, minimum from them seeks help form a mental health advisor or any physician. There is no perfect information is available regarding the level of disability experienced by the younger generation with mental health problem or the reason they are unable to reach to an expert for help (Thapar et al., 2012).

This report is going to discuss all these problems and issues that the younger generation is facing regarding their mental health. This report will focus the area of Auburn Sydney, New South wales to discuss about the issue and will propose a health promotional program regarding mental illness in this area. Further, the objectives and strategies to achieve the goal, the action plan for implementation of the program and a literature review regarding the development, implementation, and evaluation of the program will be discussed.

Mental health in younger generation is a problem that is affecting almost every country in the world. World Health Organization (WHO) has already included the disorder in the top three lists of diseases that affects a majority of the population worldwide. Auburn is a suburb city in New South Wales Australia and according to the census of 2011, the median age of population in this city is 29 years (Local Stats, 2017). Hence, majority of the people affected with mental illness is below the age of 35 and it is a matter of concern. The prime reason for the poor mental condition can be the diversity of the area. 15 percent of the population in this area speaks Arabic, 14 percent speaks English and rest are other languages. People own almost 20 percent of homes and around 45 percent are rented homes. Therefore, in the former scenario, communication becomes the reason for stress and depression and in the second scenario; shelter is the prime reason for the mental health and illness in these younger people. They have to face disgrace, shame during their work, education, stay (Lawrence et al., 2013). Further, they neglect seeking help form mental health expert. Hence, a broad population in the area is now suffering from mental illness. Fifty two percent of the people in Auburn and over the age of 15 are associated to laborer jobs and the level of education is low, that contributes to the mental illness in the young and teen people in this area. The rate of unemployment is around 12 percent that can also lead to the stress and depression in younger generation in auburn (Local Stats, 2017).

Existing Health Promotion Programs in Australia

Numerous health promotion programs are running in Australia to help the younger generation in need. Maximum of these programs are government sponsored and are driven by workers employed by the government. However, from the total health budget, government has sanctioned very few amount of money to be spend on the mental health promotion of the Auburn area (Street, Gold & Manning, 2013). Hence, the area needs a strong and appealing health promotion program that helps these younger people to come out, defeat their fear and speak up about their issues. A sound health promotion program will be employed for the area of Auburn Sydney to mitigate the problem of mental illness. The program will be titled as “Auburn Mental Health promotional Strategy” and the principle goal for the program will be promotion ways to improve mental health in teens and younger adults in the Local Government Area (LGA) Auburn of Sydney and will include the peers and parents of affected people to help them overcome the situation (Edelman, Mandle & Kudzma, 2013).

To enforce a change in the mindset of the society, people from within the society, need to be employed to make change in the scenario. Similarly, to create and implement a successful health promotional program, chosen workforce need to be active, unbiased, helpful, understanding and with experience to talk to people (Fenner et al., 2013). In this health campaign, help from the local government will  be taken to spread the awareness in a broad way, to undertake the surveys or interviews, government health experts will be employed, group of counsellors will be employed to break the ice of mentally ill people who are afraid to come out and speak about it. Volunteers will be employed for advertisement and pamphlet distribution. Finally, to conduct the entire campaign successfully help from NSW police will be taken (King, O’rourke & DeLongis, 2014).

Success of any health promotional campaign depends on its time-bound implementation. For the “Auburn mental health promotional strategy”, timeline will be one year and the expansion of it will depend on the outcomes, and recommendations (Kaufman, 2012). Recruitment of employees, selection of camp locations across auburn and planning of the program will be completed in a month (November 2017) and rest of the 11 month will be allotted for the implementation of the program. Evaluation will last another month (December 2018) and further decision will be made for expansion in the year 2019.

Auburn Mental Health Promotional Strategy

Short-term objectives
Objectives	Strategy
Raise awareness about mental illness, its symptoms, its severity and its effects on the mental and Physical health	· Promotion of mental health related programs in the city. · Employ famous person, who influences a major section of the population to speak about this issue to the people. · Arrange talk sessions in which the identification of the patient will be hidden. · Arrange programs like cricket or football tournament, singing or dancing programs to relief the stress and depression of such people.
Encourage the youth to speak up about their stress and depression fearlessly to fight with mental illness	· Arrange one-to-one talk sessions in each camp location in auburn to collect an overview of the problem. · Include the family and peers of the victim so that he or she can talk freely.
Discourage them about their suicidal thoughts and explain them how they can fight with such adverse situation	· Help them understand the value of their life. · Make them feel that mental illness is treatable and can be cured completely.
Arrange a proper counselling session for improvement in their mental health	· Employ health experts to talk with each patient to understand their level of depression.
Long-term objectives
Decrease the rate of people affected with mental health in auburn Sydney	· The strategy to achieve the long-term objectives is to successfully implement the strategies to achieve short-term goals, as the success of short-term goals will determine the achievement of long-term objectives.
Lower the rate of depression in younger generation

Implementation of “Auburn Mental Health Promotional Strategy” will focus on the above said objectives and will use the mentioned strategies with implementation of appropriate resources within a guided timeframe (Edmunds, Beidas & Kendall, 2013). To implement the strategies, an action plan will be prepared in a proposal that will contain the list of strategies, identified resources, and the timeframe required to achieve the goals. The proposed action plan is given below:

Strategy	Action/Resources	Agency or people involved	Timeframe
Objective 1: Raise awareness about mental illness, its symptoms, its severity and its effects on the mental and Physical health
Promotion of mental health related programs in the city.	Social media like Facebook and twitter to include maximum youth. Using mass media to spread the awareness	In camps in the local government of auburn	Throughout the entire event
Employ famous person, who influences a major section of the population to speak about this issue to the people.	Ask famous personalities to spread awareness about the issue, arrange sessions in colleges and workplaces where such famous personality can talk to a wide array of people	In colleges and office campuses in auburn	Every third month from commencement of the program
Arrange talk sessions in which the identification of the patient will be hidden.	Health camps and government or municipal hospitals where, experts can talk to younger adults suffering from mental illness	Government and local hospitals, health camps of auburn	In the implementation phase of program (December 2017 to November 2018)
Arrange programs like cricket or football tournament, singing or dancing programs to relief the stress and depression of such people (Holt, 2016).	Using local government to arrange such tournament or program	In auburn local government area	Thrice in the implementation phase.
Objective 2: Encourage the youth to speak up about their stress and depression fearlessly to fight with mental illness
Arrange one-to-one talk sessions in each camp location in auburn to collect an overview of the problem and including family and peers of the patient in it.
Objective 3: Discourage them about their suicidal thoughts and explain them how they can fight with such adverse situation
Help them understand the value of their life and make them feel that mental illness is treatable and can be cured completely.	Place to talk to such depressed people, health camps, inspirational programs to make them influenced to live rather than suicide	Throughout the city of auburn	January 2018  to November 2018
Objective 4: Arrange a proper counselling session for improvement in their mental health
Employ health experts to talk with each patient to understand their level of depression	Questionnaire of closed ended questions to detect the level of depression easily, health camps	Throughout the auburn city	Throughout the event

The critical aspect of health strategy planning involves the preparation of a budget including the expenses and funding. The budget must include the funding for the materials that are needed in the health strategy plan (Jackson, 2013). This section will include the salaries of the workers like volunteer staff, mental health experts and private counsellors for the campaign and promotions. Furthermore, while making the budget, it should be kept in mind that every intervention or strategy needs different set of resources (Adamopoulos & Todri, 2015). As the government and few private organizations are a part of this promotional campaign, the government should bear the maximum expense of the event.

Evaluation is an important part of any promotional event, as the success of failure of the complete program can be understood only after the evaluation process is completed. Whether the identified strategies and objectives are achieved or not can be understood using the process (Livingston et al., 2013). This health promotional camp will use the outcome evaluation process to identify the success. This specific evaluation process deals with quantitative data and identifies how the data or rate of the activity in question changes after the implementation of the interventions(Posavac, 2012). The evaluation of the health promotion program has been mentioned below:

Objective	Expected outcome	Mode of measurement
Raise awareness about mental illness, its symptoms, its severity and its effects on the mental and Physical health	Increased number of youth coming out and accepting the severity of their mental illness and seeking help fearlessly.	Internal statistics of the program, number of followers of the Facebook and twitter page number of attendance in promotional events and camps
Encourage the youth to speak up about their stress and depression fearlessly to fight with mental illness	Involvement of youth in the promotional events and accepting the fact that mental illness in as normal as fever and can be cured completely.	Attendance of youth in events that promotes mental health and speaks about mental illness loudly. Workshop and seminar attendance, community feedback (surveys), list of venues of workshops
Discourage them about their suicidal thoughts and explain them how they can fight with such adverse situation	Decrease in the number of suicides and deaths of youth in the area due to depression	Statistics from licensed sites, NSW Police Statistics, registration of young people in sports and activities that promotes healthy living
Arrange a proper counselling session for improvement in their mental health	People are aware about their disorder and willing to cure it. people are sharing everything that use to hinder them in the past to confess their mental illness	Record of conferences, workshops, number of active counselling programs in auburn and Sydney

In this section, the report is going to discuss some of the literatures that consists development, implementation and evaluation of health promotional programs regarding mental illness. According to Neiger et al. (2012), social media has tremendous capability to change the view of society and implement an intervention for the betterment of society. The process uses surveys and questionnaires to understand the effect of social media. It carried out an overarching evaluation strategy. Another strategy uses online mental health promotion and prevention interventions for youth aged 12–25 years. The results from the mental health promotion interventions indicate that there is some indication that skills-based interventions existing in a module-based format can have an important impact on teen-age mental health (Powell et al., 2012). Further, according to Curran et al. (2012), blending of clinical effectiveness of intervention and implementation can lead to success as this provides a real world example in the study. Results of such promotional event can be of three types, first one determines the effectiveness of clinical intervention, secondly, effect of both implementation and effectiveness are determined and thirdly the implementation process is assessed.

Short-term and Long-term Objectives

Conclusion

In this fast-paced world, attainment of success has become an important factor to assess someone’s capability or achievement. Level of Socio-economic status determines people and their ability to avail luxury of life. Hence, people are becoming competitive in every aspect. However, there are people, comprising average ability to perform, has to suffer from stress and depression, leading to mental illness, This non-contagious disease affects every person in the world at some point of time and the mindfulness and ability of the person determines the level of its severity or the time it will need to get cured. Auburn, a suburb from New South Wales, is suffering from its own social economical issuers and the around 12 percent of younger generation is suffering from unemployment. Hence, stress and depression in the youth has become the major matter of concern for the local government. Therefore, a health promotional program has been developed for the city of auburn that is proposed to run from November 2017 to December 2018. The campaign will comprise of surveys and questionnaires to collect the data. Through this campaign, those youth are expected to come out and speak who never talk about this issue and neglect their mental illness. Finally evaluation plan has been discussed that will determine the success or failure of the program and will determine the continuation or expansion of the process. 

References 

Adamopoulos, P., & Todri, V. (2015). The effectiveness of marketing strategies in social media: Evidence from promotional events. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (pp. 1641-1650). ACM.

Curran, G. M., Bauer, M., Mittman, B., Pyne, J. M., & Stetler, C. (2012). Effectiveness-implementation hybrid designs: combining elements of clinical effectiveness and implementation research to enhance public health impact. Medical care, 50(3), 217.

Edelman, C. L., Mandle, C. L., & Kudzma, E. C. (2013). Health Promotion Throughout the Life Span-E-Book. Elsevier Health Sciences. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ndwDAQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Edelman,+C.+L.,+Mandle,+C.+L.,+%26+Kudzma,+E.+C.+(2013).+Health+Promotion+Throughout+the+Life+SpanBook.+Elsevier+Health+Sciences.&ots=HivLoEQNlM&sig=uVjqoURnlJsxNzogEqAUT4ZjYrQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Edmunds, J. M., Beidas, R. S., & Kendall, P. C. (2013). Dissemination and implementation of evidence–based practices: Training and consultation as implementation strategies. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 20(2), 152-165.

Eldredge, L. K. B., Markham, C. M., Ruiter, R. A., Kok, G., & Parcel, G. S. (2016). Planning health promotion programs: an intervention mapping approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Fenner, Y., Garland, S. M., Moore, E. E., Jayasinghe, Y., Fletcher, A., Tabrizi, S. N., … & Wark, J. D. (2012). Web-based recruiting for health research using a social networking site: an exploratory study. Journal of medical Internet research, 14(1).

Holt, N. L. (Ed.). (2016). Positive youth development through sport. Routledge. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8Z_DCwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=mental+health+promotional+program+for+youth+&ots=qOBs4TWpaR&sig=qSatGZ9M52982WFqCmKnOVbUbtA#v=onepage&q=mental%20health%20promotional%20program%20for%20youth&f=false

Jackson, N. (2013). Promoting and marketing events: Theory and practice. Routledge. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6WDYAQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=why+we+need+budget+for+promotional+events&ots=qHD5AjHo3E&sig=CYB27essN9NoTbSc7uK16dS0itY#v=onepage&q=why%20we%20need%20budget%20for%20promotional%20events&f=false

Kaufman, C. (2012). Designing a nursing care plan for a lifetime. Nursing, 42(7), 54-60. https://dx.doi.org/10.1097/01.nurse.0000414628.00260.02

Kessler, R. C., Berglund, P. A., Chiu, W. T., Deitz, A. C., Hudson, J. I., Shahly, V., … & Bruffaerts, R. (2013). The prevalence and correlates of binge eating disorder in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Surveys. Biological psychiatry, 73(9), 904-914.

King, D. B., O’rourke, N., & DeLongis, A. (2014). Social media recruitment and online data collection: A beginner’s guide and best practices for accessing low-prevalence and hard-to-reach populations. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 55(4), 240.

Lawrence, D., Hancock, K. J., & Kisely, S. (2013). The gap in life expectancy from preventable physical illness in psychiatric patients in Western Australia: retrospective analysis of population based registers. Bmj, 346, f2539.

Livingston, J. D., Tugwell, A., Korf-Uzan, K., Cianfrone, M., & Coniglio, C. (2013). Evaluation of a campaign to improve awareness and attitudes of young people towards mental health issues. Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 48(6), 965-973.

Local Stats. (2017). Auburn Demographics (NSW) Local Stats. Auburn.localstats.com.au. Retrieved from https://auburn.localstats.com.au/demographics/nsw/sydney/parramatta/auburn

Neiger, B. L., Thackeray, R., Van Wagenen, S. A., Hanson, C. L., West, J. H., Barnes, M. D., & Fagen, M. C. (2012). Use of social media in health promotion: purposes, key performance indicators, and evaluation metrics. Health promotion practice, 13(2), 159-164.

Posavac, E. (2015). Program evaluation: Methods and case studies. Routledge. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nfQ5CgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=program+evaluation+methods&ots=nyC98dIR2c&sig=Y40dYV8GmN_nqY3FuVB89-SEUvA#v=onepage&q=program%20evaluation%20methods&f=false

Powell, B. J., McMillen, J. C., Proctor, E. K., Carpenter, C. R., Griffey, R. T., Bunger, A. C., … & York, J. L. (2012). A compilation of strategies for implementing clinical innovations in health and mental health. Medical care research and review, 69(2), 123-157.

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