Hesperian Health Guides
Mental health in our communities
During times of crisis, people often become more aware of their own and othersâ mental health; for example, when people lose homes due to fires or floods, when a factory closing creates community unemployment, or when a school shooting creates fear among children and parents. This also happened during the COVID pandemic. People often respond to crisis by taking collective action to build up their communitiesâhelping neighbors, creating mutual aid groups, and finding more ways to feel hope and purpose, and reduce isolation, anxiety, distress and loss.
Individual mental health
Everyoneâs life is filled with ups and downs, moments of both happiness and sadness. When you can handle daily life and its challenges, care for yourself and others, maintain your relationships, have a sense of purpose and feel like you âbelong,â your mental health is likely to be good. Mental health means feeling emotions but managing them, suffering from loss and disappointment but recovering, and adapting to changes.
When difficulties occur, they affect mental health by causing stronger than usual feelings of stress, worry, and sometimes even despair. Thatâs when each person draws on their personal strengths and resilience. But we donât depend on ourselves alone: we also look to the ties of love and belonging we have built with family, friends, and supportive community.
Although every person responds to mental health stresses differently, and will find different paths through them and different kinds of support helpful, promoting community while promoting mental health benefits everyone.
Itâs all connected: Individual/community, physical/mental
US society views both physical and mental health issues as individual problems with individual solutions. Yet a personâs physical and mental health respond to situations affecting groups and entire communities. While community organizing most often focuses on conditions determining physical health (like housing, food, safe streets, etc.), because physical and mental health are so interrelated, mental health improves at the same time. Likewise, a community mental health approach that targets social conditions will improve physical health.
Activity
Making connections between individual and community mental health
This group discussion of a city bus accident helps identify the connections among physical and mental health, individual and community health, and health and social conditions. Looking at all sides of a situation helps illuminate why community mental health promotion includes actions to benefit everyone, from the most affected to those affected in less visible ways.
- Describe the event and its immediate effects: After a bus accident in a busy urban area, a few passengers might have broken bones, while others have only scrapes. Probably many more will have bruises that wonât be visible until the next day, and may also feel sore for a few days. Everyone involved was frightened and some suffered a serious emotional shock. Other people in cars, on bicycles, or on the sidewalk might be affected too.
- Lead a discussion reflecting on questions such as:
Physical effects What kinds of physical effects might passengers and others have from the crash? Which are visible and which are harder to see? How many people will get care for their injuries? How will it affect peopleâs mental health to seek treatment for and possibly live with the long-term effects of their injuries?
Mental health effects: What are different ways passengers and others might react to the frightening experience of the crash? Will some try to avoid thinking about it? Will others talk through the frightening experience with friends or family? Will some have nightmares about traffic accidents? How many people will get mental health care to help them process this event?
What else might people experience? Will some refuse to take buses or bike in busy areas, and how will that affect their lives? Will people wonder if any changes will be made to prevent other accidents like this? And how will that affect the daily worries that people already manage? - Ask the group to identify possible responses the transit company and local government might propose, and what responses the community would like to see:
Will the city transit company investigate the accident? Will they fire the driver who got into the accident? Will they improve driver training? Will the transit company better maintain the buses so they are safer to ride in? Will the local government make changes so the streets become less dangerous?
Will a community group engage in a transportation justice and accountability process? Will they look into whether: The oldest buses are used in poorer neighborhoods? If roads in poorer communities are less well-maintained? If there are fewer streetlights or traffic lights? How would these actionsâand the safer streets that could resultâaffect the physical and mental health of everyone in the community?
