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Overview:

We all know that we want kids more plugged in.  

Being more plugged in means that students feel a sense of belonging - they have the skills and environment they need to become more involved and to actively seek the help they need.

To make that happen, a school environment must develop group cohesion.  Group cohesion is created from strong, healthy connections between student peers and between students and trusted adult guides throughout the community.

To engage with one another optimally, a community must discover the strengths of individuals and groups.  Discovery must be practiced and developed as a skill.  Active learning and heavily peer-influenced activities and initiatives have been show to be effective as part of a methodology to kick-start discovery and ultimately lead to deep conversations, which are the most powerful method of learning and bonding in social networks.

When a whole school community is cohesive, and has strong, healthy connections throughout, it’s members become more activated, more engaged, and more energized.  The time spent building healthy connections is repaid manyfold by a reduction in suicide, pruning and disciplinary incidents, by an increase in attendance and performance, and by an emotionally recharged community that spends the bulk of their time working preventatively, instead of performing interventions after disruptive and damaging incidents.

The makeup of a healthy school environment is unique to every school.  A healthy school environment cannot be duplicated by simply following a written manual or video series and/or taking a one-time training - rather, such an environment is built by developing ecologically valid skills and practices that are unique to each community.  These skills and practices become cultural norms that are developed across years of consistency of practice.

Defining the Social Network Health Approach within an integrated system of care:

Context in which the approach and this toolkit exist:

This toolkit describes the Social Network Health Approach to preventative mental health care as studied by the University of Rochester Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide and implemented by preventative mental health care professionals in close cooperation.

Preventative care is only one category of care within a holistic integrated system of mental health care.  Simplistically and fundamentally, it is critically important to address both Preventative and Emergency care within an integrated system.  Preventative care is clearly preferable, when effective, to emergency care when the risk of suicide is in play.

Active Research

The Network Health Approach describes tools and methods that are under active study, development, and use.

This means that this toolkit will be updated as new research dictates, and, most importantly the version history will reflect changes accurately. 

To ensure that you have the latest information, you can check the most recent update date on any page in this wiki, view and read the full version history, see when it was last peer-reviewed, sign up for updates to this toolkit, join our discussion group, and apply to become an editor.

We will update this with new research as it develops.  We have a research page where new contexts in which these tools can be used will be described as the tools are applied, researched, and tested within them.

Schools First

Throughout this toolkit, we will assume the context of a school.  We are focused on helping there.  However, this approach has been proven effective in other contexts such as in the United States Air Force, Police departments, and other contexts you can learn more about on the research page.

Universality of the Approach

TBD - this section not started - a context is just another context - each needs it’s ecological validity - that’s what makes the approach applicable anywhere - it has already been applied everywhere.

Difference from previous approaches

A network health approach to preventative care builds individual and community protective factors and social norms.  Network health approaches that address these processes, such as maximizing youth-adult connections schoolwide and heightening influence of youth with coping, create more protective schools.  

History

TBD - It is well worth mentioning that the characteristics of this approach are different than what has been created in the societies of most of the world over the last 100 years, but they are not that different from what existed and still does exist in most cultures in the more distant past. There are excellent examples of this.

Medical Model v. Strengths model

TBD - Isolate v. Integrate (In SEL parlance - Tier 1 comes before Tier 3 because it is terrible to have to isolate people - generally, 1 is the success case and 3 is the last line of defense)

We could make a matrix of all the characteristics of programs out there and see where the network health approach fits - that might be overkill to start with, but it would be useful to those who are trying to find the right approach in a sea of approaches.

Definitions/Naming:

TBD