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Overview:

Humanity is experiencing a crisis in mental health.

A key result from meta analysis is that although many factors are believed to increase the risk of developing a mental health condition, focusing on those factors is not the most efficient way to reduce the prevalence of mental health conditions. [citation required]

Instead, building protective factors across a community, resulting in a widespread sense of belonging seems to be extremely effective in reducing the risk of mental health conditions.

Individuals who feel a sense of belonging in their community have the skills and environment they need to become more involved and to actively seek the help they need.

To make that happen in a community (a school environment, for example), the school community 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.

Context:

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

This toolkit describes the Social Network Health Approach to preventative mental health care, drawing on published research from the University of Rochester Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide and from the implementations by preventative mental health care professionals in close cooperation with them.

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 because the need for preventative solutions and research is strong.  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

Programs are developed from approaches. Ecological validity is one part of the Network Health Approach that demands that a program is developed specifically and uniquely for a community - that’s what makes this approach so broadly applicable. This contention is supported by researched implementation across a breadth of communities.

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

The history of preventative mental health care is beyond the scope of this wiki, but it is worth arguing 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. Not an immediate focus, but the fact that research has taken humanity full circle to rediscovered excellence is notable and in some cases relevant.

Medical Model v. Strengths model - Isolate v. Integrate

The medical model of care requires identification of a weakness to begin recommending treatment. In mental health care, some issues have no strong correlates that can be identified as weaknesses early on. Interestingly, there are correlates that can be identified as risk factors in communities that are much stronger indicators of future risk, and more readily identifiable, than individual risk factors. In some cases, strengths-based models that seek to identify strengths of individuals and communities have been shown to be more effective in reducing risk factors than a weakness-based medical model. Treating a community preventatively withy a strengths based-model can also be done without isolating individuals as weak links, separating them from connections. Instead, a strengths based preventative care program identifies strengths and integrates individuals into broader communities.

In the parlance of Social Emotional Learning in US schools there Tiers - Tier 1 (prevention-based) comes before Tier 3 (isolation-based) because it is, colloquially, terrible to have to isolate people - generally, Tier 1 is the success case and Tier 3 is the last line of defense for individuals who need it. This is appropriate prioritization from the perspective of a social network health approach. In practical implementation, however, far fewer communities put as many resources into effective Tier 1 programming as Tier 3.

TBD - 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.

Practical Implementation

TBD - this is where we add a very brief summary of the practical implementation sections, which are much more linear and will have their own flow.

Precautions

TBD