Need for an Integrative Conceptual Framework for Addressing Mental Health Challenges During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The burden of mental illness across the globe, already significant, has grown dramatically since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is, in part, due to limitations in the current conceptual frameworks for understanding mental illness and resulting methods of practice. This paper provides an overview of the state of mental health and illness in the world, summarizes the prevailing frameworks and practices, and introduces a potential framework which could guide a response to the mental health challenges of the pandemic.

Three Essential Elements to Demystify Prejudice and Promote Literacy in Mental Health

The text is based on the scientific research carried out by the author during the many years that she has tried to follow the evolution of mental health at an international level, in Portugal and in the Autonomous Region of Madeira. It is based on the knowledge deepened through critical reflection carried out throughout the training and professional processes in which it has participated. The performance as a professor at the University of Madeira-Health Higher School, the real experience as a provider of specialized nursing care in mental and psychiatric health to population groups living in different communities, the various intervention contexts in which mental healthcare is available, the different circumstances of health and illness observed in people who experience transactional and adaptive processes at various stages of the life cycle are real contributions that have been constituted as a source of essential material for a critical and constructive look at one of the great challenges that health and mental health services and their professionals face in today's societies.

The Impact of Assistive Technologies on Quality of Life and Psychosocial Well-Being

Health-related quality of life is a comprehensive term to describe a person's experiences of health and illness. Quality of life (QOL) is a dynamic psychological construct encompassing interacting subjective and objective dimensions; thus, it is not directly observable. There is no gold standard for measuring quality of life due to the differing interests of doctors, caregivers, patients, and researchers. This chapter examines the research needs in the area of improving QoL through the proper implementation of AT. The authors also make recommendations for incorporating the needs of users and caregivers in the design, deployment, and use of AT to reduce device abandonment.

Good Self-Rated Health as an Indicator of Personal Capability in Old Age

Self-rated health, or self-assessed health, is based on asking individuals to evaluate their general health status on a four- or five-point scale, with response options ranging from ‘very good’ to ‘very poor’. This simple question has been one of the most frequently used health indicators for decades. In nursing research, the voices, interpretations and understanding of humans, as well as their ability to shape their experiences, are studied through the collection and analysis of primarily qualitative materials that are subjective and narrative in nature. However, knowledge about subjective experiences of health and illness, situated and filtered through the life-world of the individual, can also be sought using other approaches. The aim of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, it aims to outline perspectives on how epidemiology and population-based studies of self-rated health as an indicator of subjective experiences can generate new evidence to solve nursing problems and expand nursing knowledge. Secondly, based on the hypothesis that there is an association between good self-rated health and a person’s capability to master the gains and losses of late life, the chapter also aims to describe how personal capability can be operationalised as self-rated health, given that this seemingly simple question delegates to the individual the task of synthesising, in a single evaluation, the many dimensions that make up the complex concept of health and wellbeing in old age. Although a person’s capabilities are dependent on a large variety of factors, at the individual level, symptom experience, chronic illnesses and functional disability are paramount. Therefore, in this chapter, the focus will be on self-rated health as an indicator of personal capability in the fourth age – the period of late life characterised by illness, frailty, impairment and dependence on others. To study self-rated health during this period of life is especially interesting in that the discrepancy between subjective and objective health seems to increase with age, and older olds tend to rate their health as better than younger olds given the same level of disease and functioning.

Migrant doctors’ narratives about patients

Narratives of personal and vicarious experience are part and parcel of being a doctor, as doctors routinely (re)interpret and (re)tell patients’ narratives when reflecting on clinical cases. Taking an interest in migrant doctors’ self-initiated narratives about patients in doctor-researcher interviews about cultural transitions, this study examines over thirty hours of audio-recordings of forty semi-structured interviews conducted as part of a collaborative project in Chile and Hong Kong. The study explores how migrant doctors construct their professional ‘self’ through narratives about patients, and how these narratives help migrant doctors legitimise their arguments and professional stance in criticizing cultural and societal attitudes towards health and illness, and the professional practices of local doctors. Finally, the paper reflects on the ways in which migrant doctors’ identity positionings provide space for the creation of a “symbolic territory” in which the practices of migrant doctors co-exist within the boundaries of the practices of local doctors in the host culture.

The Three-Talk Model: Getting Both Evidence and Preferences into a Pre-Service Teacher Health Workshop

We describe a pre-service teacher workshop about sustainable health decisions in school. This one-week workshop had two goals: to improve the ability of students to cope with health and illness as teachers in daily school life, and to improve scientific literacy in health contexts. In this way, the workshop aimed at creating a situation of mutual benefit between science education and health education, as it is suggested in the new science pedagogy called Science|Environment|Health. To reach this aim, the workshop was structured by the evidence-preference approach and the three-talk model, both originally developed for shared-decision making in medicine. In the evidence-preference approach, the experts (the physician, here the teacher) provide the best evidence available, while the laypersons (the patient, here the teacher students) bring in their preferences and, together with the experts, find their personal standpoint. This process is structured by the three-talk model, which is conceived as a characteristic succession of choice talk, option talk, and decision talk. We describe how the pre-service teacher workshop embraced this new approach, compare it to a scientific literacy point of view, and suggest how it could be applied in many other educational contexts, particularly in many issues of education for sustainability.