Definitions
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Dissemination
- Evidence-based
- Knowledge Mobilization
- Knowledge Synthesis
- Mental Health
- Mental Health Literacy
- Young Adults
- Youth Engagement & Permission Engagement
Anxiety
Everyone feels nervous, worried or anxious at times. Events or situations like writing tests, being really busy or speaking in public can lead to feelings of fear or worry.
For some people their worry and fear continue and the intense feelings of anxiety can become overwhelming. These feelings might indicate an anxiety disorder and that an individual requires help in addressing their anxiety.
Anxiety disorders are the most common type of mental health problems. However, anxiety disorders can be diagnosed and there are a number of effective treatments.
Depression
Feelings of sadness are a normal part of life. Our emotions are important because they help us understand and respond to important experiences and events in our life.
For many people, however, there are times in life when feelings of sadness are so intense and last so long (a couple of weeks or more) that they start to interfere with life. We refer to this problem as depression.
Depression is a problem that many people go through at some point in their lives. Even more people will have a family member or a friend who experiences problems with depression. Fortunately, there are a number of effective treatments available.
Dissemination
Dissemination often refers to the activities that are involved with broadcasting information to a large audience. Within the Mobilizing Minds project we hope to disseminate, or share, the youth-friendly resources that we are creating with young adults, their supporters and the professionals that work with young adults, like doctors or counselors.
Evidence-based
If a treatment or information resource is evidence-based this means that it has been studied or researched in a scientific way that shows there is some proof that it is helpful.
Knowledge Mobilization
Mobilizing Minds defines knowledge mobilization as getting the right information to the right people in the right format and at the right time to help make informed decisions. Other terms that are used to describe this process include knowledge translation (KT), knowledge transfer (KT) and knowledge exchange (KE).
Knowledge Synthesis
Knowledge synthesis is the process of gathering and collecting information from many different sources to help inform people that use knowledge and make decisions. As part of Mobilizing Minds, our team used knowledge synthesis methods to locate scientific information required to answer questions about mental health that young adults identified as being important.
Mental Health
A quick search on the Internet will show you that there are many definitions of mental health. In their definition, the World Health Organization relates mental health to the ability of an individual to realize his or her abilities, cope with the stresses of life, and work productively.
Mental Health Literacy
Mental health literacy can be defined as the knowledge and beliefs about mental health and mental health problems that influence how people identify and deal with these issues. Mental health literacy includes identifying when a problem exists and knowing what actions to take to address such problems.
Young Adults
When we say young adults we are usually speaking about people that are between the ages of 18 and 25. Mobilizing Minds focuses on this age group because 25% of young adults experience a mental health problem over this period of development and less than half seek help (Newman et al., 1996). Indeed, young adults have the highest rate of unmet mental health care needs. That being said, young people that are younger than 18 or older than 25 might also find the information on our website or in our resources helpful.
Youth Engagement & Permission Engagement
Within the context of the Mobilizing Minds project, our core community partner mindyourmind (mindyourmind.ca) facilitates our young adult team using the principles of Permission Engagement. Permission Engagement is a term that mindyourmind has coined to describe how and what they do. Permission Engagement is based heavily on the principles of Permission Marketing. Mental health promotion is about marketing the idea of change; that mental health is achievable; that it can improve quality of life and that all have the ability to lead through change.
The practice of Permission Engagement determines how to sell youth and young adults on the notion of change but starts with reframing the way relationships are built. Mutual social transactions are based on respect for the integrity, intelligence and culture of both youth and adults. Permission Engagement is also about encouraging youth to raise their hands to be involved, encouraging them to ask questions and discover how their lives can be impacted because of a meaningful partnership with an adult.
mindyourmind’s vision sees youth transform into focused self advocates and community assets.