At the top of the news, you saw Nurse Eleanor Bennett's interview about the Vasquez and Elijio cases, well we met Bennett at the Biltmore for the launch of two projects geared towards addressing mental illness - quite fitting given these cases. The first is called the Measurement of Mental Health among Adolescents and the other project is Population Level Project and the Helping Adolescents Thrive. Here is more from the event.
Eleanor Bennett
"So today is a kick off seminar it is related to two mental health projects that the Ministry of Health and UNICEF along with some other partners are collaborating on so the first project is called the measurement of mental health among adolescents in the population and really what this part of the project entails is to validate and adapt a tool that will be used to access the population prevalence of various mental disorders including depression, anxiety, suicide, self-harm and some other disorders so what we are trying to do is to make sure that this instrument when we use it it captures the information that we want to and that mean we have to adapt it to a Belize situation and the Belize perspective and so that is that project and how , it is a very complicated methodology that involves review of the instrument by experts, we have focus groups with adolescents and then we have a pilot."
"The second project is called how to help adolescence thrive or HAT so what that project is about is it is going to look at how Belizean adolescents understand mental wellness and mental health and that involves focus groups with adolescents and the information gathered from that is going to form the development of some interventions that will be tailored for Belize."
Courtney Weatherburne:
"How impactful are these projects going to be, how can we see them working on the ground to ensure that these projects are not just documents that are drafted?"
Eleanor Bennett
"Absolutely, that is an excellent question it is something we considered when we put our energies behind these projects that UNICEF brought to us we need to have good data and good data is a start where we can convince the powers that be of the importance of mental health, the situation as it is on the ground. It will help us develop policies and plan interventions that are specific because we will know where the needs are, we will now how much of a particular service we need."
It was a one day event.
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