In the wake of a COVID-19 world, conversations about mental wellness have started sprouting across the globe, given persistent isolation measures to curb the virus and the resulting impact on mental health. Such conversations are not always easy to have, but here at NUS, we have a team of students bravely charging forward.
A Public Health Challenge was held by the NUS Public Health Interest Group last semester, with mental health as its theme. Over the course of three Saturdays, various teams brainstormed to develop new and innovative ideas to help alleviate mental health issues faced by students. Eventually, Project SPECTRUM, headed by Wellace Leong, Sean Toh, Karen Lee and Coco Yau, emerged first in the competition.
Seeing the need for more targeted mental health initiatives in NUS, the team of four are motivated to implement their project.
Today, we speak with Coco Yau, SPECTRUM’s Outreach Manager, to find out more about their project – which will be implemented in NUS to foster mental wellness within our community.
1. Hi Coco, would you like to introduce yourself and your team?
Hello! I am Coco and I’m a Year Three Psychology Major residing in Tembusu College. My team includes me and three other people – Sean (Year 4 Psychology), Karen (Year 4 Psychology) and Wellace (Year 4 Statistics & Applied Probability). Sean is in charge of content development, Karen manages the media and Wellace handles the data analytics. As for me, I source for outreach opportunities by reaching out to the mental health organisations on campus, to help them roll out SPECTRUM in their respective communities.
2. Why is the Project named SPECTRUM?
SPECTRUM is a student movement that hopes to enact a paradigm shift on how we think about mental health. The very essence of SPECTRUM is in its name itself: we aim for students to learn to view mental health as a spectrum. Many times, we see mental health from a dichotomous perspective – well or unwell. This is why many individuals feel that there is a threshold that one has to hit before they are ‘depressed enough’ or ‘anxious enough’ to seek help. This perspective on mental health is dangerous as these individuals would typically already be in a severe state of distress before they finally decide to seek help.
In seeing mental health as a spectrum, we recognise that the concept of mental health is fluid. For example, I can be coping well and feeling good one day, but the next day I can easily become extremely stressed and anxious, perhaps due to a situation that occurred in my family.
3. Why is the concept of seeing mental health as a spectrum important?
Seeing mental health as a spectrum encourages individuals to be aware of their own mental state, and do internal check-ins. If we notice that we are feeling a little on the edge, we can start to seek help, even if it’s just confiding in a friend. It’s also this concept that helps us internalise that we can recover and improve our mental state overtime – just because we may be in a negative state now doesn’t mean we will stay like this forever. And if we are feeling alright, we can always ask ourselves how we can maintain this positive state. Thus, it becomes a motive to sustain mental wellness, by engaging in strategies that guide us towards it.
4. What does SPECTRUM involve?
SPECTRUM consists of three different pillars: Education, Contact and Interpersonal relationships. Firstly, Education aims to break down the stigma of mental health and bring more awareness to the topic. We want students to understand that having mental health issues is not a foreign topic but a very real one that may, in fact, be present in them already. In dealing with this, we would want to teach students how to safely disclose their struggles to trusted individuals in their personal lives. But that’s just one aspect of the education we plan to instil.
Secondly, Contact involves us inviting other students on campus who have sought help in our school’s counselling services, have lived experience or are currently in recovery. We hope that this can create a safe space for individuals to share and converse about mental health and disclose their personal experiences with others. In the process, students can resonate with each other’s struggles, and be empowered to seek help and give help.
Thirdly, building Interpersonal Relationships. Developed from the ACL model of awareness, courage and love, this pillar aims to build community resilience. Awareness guides us to manage one’s own emotions and that of others, Courage aims to give people the knowledge on how to safely disclose their struggles to others and love, moulds us to care for others emotionally and appropriately respond to their struggles.
5. What makes your project different from other Mental Health Initiatives in NUS?
One unique facet of SPECTRUM is that participants must join our session in groups of people they know. For example, if you live in an NUS residence, you can join with your level mates or your neighbours. As we will be facilitating an activity where students can apply the skills they have learnt to better support their friends in the right ways, we hope that students will be able to come away from our programme with full trust that the friends that they joined this course with can provide them comfort and be there for them when they need it. We want to spark mental health conversations within these communities and allow them to grow together in this journey.
Also, by actively going out there to advocate, influence and teach rather than waiting for the students come to us, we hope that this can be an initiative that targets every single NUS student and that no one gets left behind.
6. How can students get involved in this project?
SPECTRUM is currently in the works of holding focus group discussions (FGDs) to collect data – required for assessing students’ needs – which will be used to formulate our pilot projects. These pilot projects are small, bite-size pieces of SPECTRUM which will be test run during our sessions. Students can get involved in these pilot tests and focus group discussions so do keep a lookout for these programmes!
We are kicking off our project by first targeting those living in residence. Currently, we have connected with four different residential housing: CAPT, Yale-NUS, USP and Tembusu. Our data analytics team will be conducting proper needs assessments in these residences through FGDs and pilot workshops, in order to collect and analyse the feedback to finetune the SPECTRUM Programme.
Eventually, when the final form of SPECTRUM is rolled out officially, we aim to collate information on students’ mental well-being through the questionnaires in our programme to formulate a dashboard. From this, we can then monitor and evaluate the mental health needs of every residence such that if for example, Tembusu College suddenly has a spike in mental health issues, we can look into why this has happened and what we can do to address it. This dashboard will be also shared with relevant stakeholders such as OSA, or relevant college administration, so that they can be better informed to roll out interventions.
7. What knowledge do students lack that makes it difficult to evaluate their own mental wellness?
A lot of students may not be able to go greater into detail to express how they are truly feeling as they do not understand their own emotional triggers and tendencies. Do you know when you are feeling too overwhelmed and when you need to seek help? If you are doing well mentally, do you know what personally helps you to sustain it? Learning our own emotional triggers and what we can do to help ourselves is the first step to caring for our own mental health – but it’s also a huge gap that’s lacking in students’ knowledge.
It could be because some students perceive their mental health as something that can be easily overlooked. When they feel a bit stressed they might just keep telling themselves, “it’s ok, I can do this” and let their negative emotions accumulate until they finally reach a breaking point. However, just like our physical health, mental health is something that requires an active effort to maintain.
8. What are your hopes for how we can better deal with the topic of mental health in the future?
There’s no health without mental health. My hopes for the future is that people can start seeing mental health as a spectrum and be more aware of their own mental health state. I am optimistic that more mental health conversations can take place and that we will one day reach the stage where we can have conversations about our own mental health with one another, without having that awkward feeling or discomfort. It’s a big wish but I hope that SPECTRUM can be the first step in moving towards that goal.
Source: Harvard Business Review
Have you taken a look into your own mental health and the ways you can best cope with it? It’s alright if you haven’t or if you don’t even know where to begin – that’s where SPECTRUM comes in. Keep a lookout for activities that SPECTRUM will be holding on campus! If you would like to be involved in the planning of SPECTRUM’s content, you can also join SPECTRUM through the NUS Public Health Interest Group. Have a good recess week ahead!
All pictures and infographics courtesy of Coco and team.
