Saturday, September 27, 2014
Post #2
Over the course of this week, each team member will individually be creating a list of questions and discussion points to address with teachers, educators, administrators, students and friends on the topic of education around teen depression and anxiety. We are also compiling lists of specific people we can contact in order to discuss these questions. Next week we will combine our lists of questions and contacts, assign tasks to each group member and begin making contact with these people. We really want to find out from the student and teacher population what they think would be most beneficial to them. This will give us more direction on where to focus our energy moving forward. -Jason Utley
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I look forward to learning more about who you've included on your list of key stakeholders. It's important to assess current education around teen depression and anxiety. Is there any? If so, is it effective? Where are the gaps? Also, I recommend collecting data/stats around the incidence of depression and anxiety among teens. This will assist in validating that depression and anxiety ARE a problem among this population. Finally, who will your target population be? Teachers? Teens WITH depression/anxiety? Teens WITHOUT these issues?
ReplyDeleteThis comment is our post for the week, as I am struggling to post. Included in our list of stakeholders and individuals we are planning on speaking with are: adolescents, parents of adolescents, high school educators, mental health specialists, and preexisting organizations that are addressing mental health education/awareness. This past Saturday I met and spoke with Peter Cornish, he is NAMI's volunteer Salt Lake Affiliate Board of Directors. As a parent and person living with a mental illness, he informed me of various support programs directed toward teens, their families, and teachers. He also introduced me to the Hope for Tomorrow/Parents & Teachers as Allies in-service program offered to schools. Peter mentioned the programs recent presentation to Judge High School (a private school) but barriers faced with reaching out to school districts. He connected me with contact information to reach NAMI's school based prevention specialist, Julie Schwartz. The plan is to reach out to Julie to learn more and see if there is an opportunity to collaborate efforts. Our group will be meeting today to discuss our conversations with stakeholders over the break, final project, and narrow down a target population. Gathering data/stats to validate the claim of teen depression/anxiety needing to be addressed will also be a priority.
ReplyDeleteThis all sounds great, and I am glad you are contacting various stakeholders. Maybe there's a possibility of joining forces with NAMI on a project? Gathering data will be important for inclusion in the final paper (i.e., contextualizing the problem) as well as the consequences of depression/anxiety. You will want to "convince" the reader that the problem is real and needs to be addressed. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteI don't know why our group is having trouble with posting new posts but it still won't let me do it! So I will just write it here again I guess.
ReplyDeleteSo for the past two weeks, our group has been diving deeper into the "politics" of our project and the reality of how this project could work... or even "if" it would work. We have been discussing this with one of our informants, Rich Landward, who took a project like this on a few years ago. He mentioned that in order to get stakeholders involved, we have to go about this a different way.. that is based on a academic model.
The stakeholders in the schools are focused on making sure that their students graduate and successfully prepare themselves for life after graduation. This "success" is based on a number of factors. First, Academics. This is a very important part of making sure our students are prepared for life after graduation. Also, health and social services are key to making sure our students are able to successfully navigate their lives. Parent engagement is also very important. And finally, youth development in personal wellness and happiness. This is based off the idea that if students have high self esteem, positive connections and good roles models, they will be more successful. So, to get stakeholders on board with our project of increasing mental health awareness in schools, we have to go about it from a academic success perspective.
Another thing we discussed was the target population we wanted to focus on. We have not decided whether we should select a specific school or school district, I think that will come later when we get a bigger picture of what our project will look like and how we are able to go about spreading this education.
We looked over the contextualizing the problem assignment and assigned specific parts to each group member. Question 1 (What is the issue/problem the community has decided to focus on?) will be done by Josh, Question 2 (What is causing the issue/problem?) will be done by Elana. Question 3 (What are the effects/consequences of the problem?) will be done by Jason. And Question 4 and 5 (Who is the population most affected by these issues and who are the other stakeholders/actors?) will be done by Amy.
This is good. As discussed in class, you could work on teen depression/anxiety in the general population, as schools are difficult to access. We also talked about the possibility of linking with NAMI. Finally, I'm wondering if your intervention could actually be some sort of report/recommendations to give to schools that documents the need for mental health inclusion in schools. This is just a thought. Anyway, I'm glad that you've divided up the paper, and I look forward to reading it. Thanks.
ReplyDelete