Media Awareness Program Report
A WFMH “Media Awareness Program” has been developed by Global Mental Health Video. The program has now expanded into areas of media such as print and radio, and has accordingly been renamed Mental Health Media (MHM). MHM is a partnership for WFMH of the Collaborating Center IPSER in the Netherlands and Worldview International Foundation (WIF) in Sri Lanka.
This program is designed to present material on mental health promotion to the general public, and also to increase the awareness of policymakers. An additional goal is to provide training materials for public sector health personnel. There is a strong emphasis on providing the means for community empowerment and individual self-help in dealing with mental disorders.
The current plan is to create video presentations and adapt these as training films with relevant mental health educational information for use in seminars and workshops. Programs are being developed for self-learning and distant education.
As it develops the program MHM expects to use radio, TV/video, printed matter, the Internet and CD-roms. Where appropriate, it will incorporate the “problem-based” learning techniques often used in seminars, workshops and focus groups into the videos and other material it creates.
MHM collaborates with WHO’s Nations for Mental Health program, and has produced two videos with its support: Sriyawathie (set in Sri Lanka) and Guraidhoo (set in the Maldives). Sriyawathie was first shown on TV in 1997 and 1998 and was also screened at the Board meeting in Maastricht in 1998.
Recently, as a demonstration of Nations for Mental Health projects, this video was shown to the WHO World Health Assembly members in Geneva and received general acclaim. This was high visibility for Mental Health Media as well as for WFMH, demonstrating our strong partnership with WHO.
No additional videos have been produced at this time for lack of funding, but projects related to mental health and drug abuse have been developed using other media formats, such as talk shows for young people in Thailand and Sri Lanka. These were partially supported by an ISSC-UNESCO grant to WFMH. Recently this work has been extended in Thailand to include collaboration with the UN agency ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) to produce a media profile of its research into sexual abuse in South East Asia.
We look forward to expanding Mental Health Media to other regions of the world, and a grant application is pending to allow us to do so, working with WHO’s Nations for Mental Health and WFMH.
-Marten deVries