Supporting Mental Health Through Online Education
The challenges healthcare executives and administrators face are constantly changing. Host Kevin Stevenson talks with the heroes behind the heroes that are enabling hospitals, urgent care centers and telemedicine operators to spend their time tending to patients, while they handle the logistics.
Mental health is a topic that was trending well before the pandemic took its toll, but it is even more important that we have open conversations about mental health now. Pathways to Empower, which provides resources to help teach people the brain science of building resilience and fostering mental health is doing just that.
On today’s episode, Kevin Stevenson speaks with Donna Volpita, Founder & Education Director, Pathways to Empower to learn more about how we can all work towards mental wellness. One way to keep the conversation going on such a challenging topic is to embrace mental health literacy. “Literacy is just an understanding of a subject. So mental health literacy is just the ability to understand and talk about mental health. So just like, you know, literacy in terms of books is can you talk about reading? Can you have a discussion about the novel? And math is having discussions about math things, but mental health literacy, right now, there’s such a stigma,” Volpita said.
She went on to explain that teaching people how to take care of their mental health is just as important as teaching them about physical health. That being said, Volpita acknowledges that these conversations are not easy to have. “But we don’t talk about mental health and very few people feel comfortable talking about mental health. Now, we are seeing that this next generation is much more comfortable,” Volpita noted.
Her goal is to make mental health much more of a common discussion. “We would like to change the paradigm in mental health to be more about being proactive. How do we prevent mental health issues rather than being reactive and only be about treating mental health issues?” Volpita said.