Whole Community

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Dr Peter Wyman discusses how building the skills and knowledge within a community, to maintain and promote community health is important to good outcomes.

Children develop through interactions within social systems (e.g., families, schools), and interventions in these systems can influence emotional and behavioral developmental. Normative social systems—such as public schools, community youth organizations—are settings for universal interventions and serve the broadest populations. Interventions delivered universally have the greatest theoretic potential to affect change at a preventive level, if such interventions can address needs and priorities to make them attractive to social systems. System-level interventions modify social ecologic contexts, which have risk-protective effects above and beyond individual factors.

Whole community addresses:

(1) Childhood programs strengthen a broad set of self-regulation processes (i.e., behavioral and emotional self-control) through family and school-based modalities

(2) Adolescent programs that leverage system-level influences (e.g., peer norms) to prevent emerging risk behaviors (e.g., substance abuse) and strengthen relationships and skills that are protective (e.g., coping).

Notes and references:

Social Science & Medicine                     Social Science & Medicine 296 (2022) 114737

Findings support a growing case for the unique contribution of group-level interventions to improve social health of broader populations. The Wingman-Connect Program trains all members of natural organizational units together to strengthen group bonds and the diffusion of suicide-protective norms and practices. Skill-building activities focus on relationships and practices supportive of mental health.

Group skill-building activities identify strengths of all group members, and members learn how a strong network supports all members’ health and fitness. W-CP uses high energy activities and peer-to-peer teaching; exercises inside and outside of training promote adoption of skills into unit culture.

NIMH

Program structure and key elements together strengthen relationship networks, cohesion, adaptive coping and group norms using group-based, interactive training based on research-informed strategies.

Discovery:

Discovery of personal strengths and how those strengths impact our social network, and the discovery of other’s strengths and how those strengths impact us and the social network.   Everyone’s competencies are recognized.

Dr. Peter Wyman’s interview 2022

Peer Influence:

Social networks provide the mechanisms for the diffusion of norms and practices and the context for peer group monitoring and support.  Positive social bonds augment the protective factors while learning and modeling skills for growing relationships and developing connections to each other.  These connections reduce ‘Pruning’.  

NIMH

WINGMAN-CONNECT PROGRAM MODEL AND DEVELOPMENT

Wingman-Connect is an adaptation of a network-informed intervention. Since 2010, PI Wyman has led research (NIH, CDC funded) testing that program, which disseminates skills for social health through youth peer networks.  The high-energy, interactive training improves student connectedness and coping norms, and protective effects spread school-wide including adult help for suicidal youth.  A study aggregating three RCTs (N=78 schools; 39,900 students) showed fewer suicide deaths in schools implementing this approach.  

Wingman-Connect Program structure and key elements together strengthen relationship networks, cohesion, adaptive coping and group norms.

Program’s novel group intervention strengthens social bonds as well as peer network norms that incentivize healthy coping. This interactive training progresses from individual engagement (e.g., each participant shares career goals and values) to building group level skills and norms (e.g., mapping group strengths).

JAMA Open Network, October, 2020

Airmen learn skills to grow and sustain protective factors essential to job success, mental health and reduced suicide risk (Kinship, Purpose, Guidance, Balance). Class exercises create more cohesive units with skills extended into group culture.  Wingman Connect training is delivered to organizational units using interactive exercises to build key group and individual protective factors (Four Cores):

The study’s findings validate the underlying network health model: stronger bonds within a more cohesive healthy class reduced suicidal ideation and depression symptoms. These findings suggest that training classes became increasingly unified around healthy norms and encouraged classmates who were vulnerable to mental health or occupational problems at a key juncture of military training, in addition to meeting their needs for belonging. Work with recent social network modeling show that cohesive groups serve a protective regulatory function through norms and pressures to conform.

Social Science & Medicine                     Social Science & Medicine 296 (2022) 114737

Wingman-Connect counteracted the typical drift towards disconnection for Airmen at elevated suicide risk. Six-month findings again showed that W-CP offset the typical trajectory of decreasing connections for Airmen at elevated suicide risk.

These findings are, to our knowledge, the first to show that a suicide prevention program for small personnel units improved significantly the group relationship network and socially integrated members over time. This study extends knowledge of the social and relationship impact of the Wingman-Connect Program as it decreased suicide risk.

Wingman-Connect Program counteracted the expected drift towards disconnection for Airmen at elevated suicide risk by targeting the unit’s relationship network itself. These groups built enhanced suicide protection into their relationship networks, with the most consistent benefits for Airmen at elevated risk of suicide and for those starting with fewest connections.

Program built enhanced suicide protection into unit relationship networks and counteracted standard drift towards disconnection for at-risk Airmen, despite no explicit content targeting connections specifically to at-risk Airmen. Findings support a growing case for the unique contribution of group-level interventions to improve social health of broader populations.