Mental Health In The Community

This course examines community-based approaches and interventions for promoting community well-being as well as preventing and managing mental health illnesses. The course covers exciting, innovative approaches such as low intensity psychotherapeutic interventions, telemedicine, and promoting mental health messages through new approaches (e.g., social media) - efforts aiming at plugging gaps in services that have traditionally focused on treating more clinically significant illnesses. There will be discussions on emerging research that examines the implementation and outcomes of community mental health programmes and the controversies and challenges in-down-scaling psychological interventions to new settings where they are administered by professionals not traditionally trained in the specialization of psychology. Issues relating to the current state of mental health in Singapore and efforts to improve it will be touched on. Students will be encouraged to apply lessons learned to the Singapore context.