Mental health: it's a word that carries a stigma in Belizean society, and hearing it, most people revert to that ugly catch-all term, "crazy".
But, mental health is not a bad word, and it's as important as physical health.
That's why the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education want to introduce a curriculum on Mental health in schools countrywide. It's called the School Mental Health Literacy Project. The aim is to train teachers so that they can go into the classroom, and educate their students how to maintain their mental health, and how to aid their peers who are suffering from mental illness.
This morning, we stopped by the Government's workshop to introduce the curriculum in Belize, and spoke with one of the facilitators about the benefits of this program:
Dr. Stan Kutcher - Psychiatry Professor, Dalhousie University
"Mental Health literacy is the foundation for everything that we do with mental health. It includes obtaining and maintaining mental health. It includes understanding mental disorders and their treatments. It includes decreasing stigma. It includes helping young people to know when to get help, and giving them skills to get the help they need when they need it. And so, it's really important that we be able to put this in schools because that's where the young people are. So, this approach teaches teachers how to apply this intervention in the school setting, and it has really powerful outcomes, not just for the students, but also for the teachers, and their own families."
"Young people have tremendous potential to do good in the world. They also have the potential to not do as well as they could do. And so what Mental Health literacy does is it teaches them those key components about mental health that helps them breakdown that stigma that gives them the tools, the knowledge that they can use to make their own lives better, but also the lives of their peers, and also the life of their families better. So, when they learn that mental illness is not all about being crazy, then they become more empathetic to those of their peers who may be suffering. They learn that they don’t need to suffer in silence themselves. They learn how the reach out and help their fellow human beings, instead of avoiding them."
The School Mental Health Literacy Project is in its preliminary phases, and roll-out is planned for several months from now.
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