Darryl David on advancing mental health
Early identification and intervention on mental health conditions are essential to the success of the national plan to promote mental wellness, said MP Darryl David. Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday (Feb 6), he pointed out that since the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of mental wellness has taken on greater importance and urgency. He hopes the Government and whole of society will adopt a more targeted approach to promote the topic and make mental health care more accessible to those who need it. Mr David suggested ways to enhance the mental health ecosystem. One way is to normalise help-seeking. He suggested setting up an inter-ministerial workgroup to look into promoting mental health awareness in schools and workplaces, as well as with the public. He urged the Ministry of Education to consider blending mental wellness practices into the formal school or core curriculum. The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) could help to strengthen the adoption of employee assistance programmes to help workers manage stresses instead of having companies design their own support schemes from scratch. On the public front, a greater level of awareness must be created on what constitutes mental health and how poor mental health and well-being is different from having a psychiatric disorder. Mr David urged MOM and the Ministry of Communications and Information to run awareness campaigns to highlight the differences and to educate the public that those who seek help for mental wellness issues are not “crazy”, but are “merely unwell”, very much like how someone could have caught the flu. He also suggested splitting the functions of the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) into different institutions. There should be a national mental wellness centre that focuses on subsidised intervention for mental health while IMH continues to provide interventions mainly for psychiatric disorders. He said delinking mental health interventions from psychiatric intervention will further help to de-label and de-stigmatise help-seeking.
Early identification and intervention on mental health conditions are essential to the success of the national plan to promote mental wellness, said MP Darryl David. Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday (Feb 6), he pointed out that since the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of mental wellness has taken on greater importance and urgency. He hopes the Government and whole of society will adopt a more targeted approach to promote the topic and make mental health care more accessible to those who need it. Mr David suggested ways to enhance the mental health ecosystem. One way is to normalise help-seeking. He suggested setting up an inter-ministerial workgroup to look into promoting mental health awareness in schools and workplaces, as well as with the public. He urged the Ministry of Education to consider blending mental wellness practices into the formal school or core curriculum. The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) could help to strengthen the adoption of employee assistance programmes to help workers manage stresses instead of having companies design their own support schemes from scratch. On the public front, a greater level of awareness must be created on what constitutes mental health and how poor mental health and well-being is different from having a psychiatric disorder. Mr David urged MOM and the Ministry of Communications and Information to run awareness campaigns to highlight the differences and to educate the public that those who seek help for mental wellness issues are not “crazy”, but are “merely unwell”, very much like how someone could have caught the flu. He also suggested splitting the functions of the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) into different institutions. There should be a national mental wellness centre that focuses on subsidised intervention for mental health while IMH continues to provide interventions mainly for psychiatric disorders. He said delinking mental health interventions from psychiatric intervention will further help to de-label and de-stigmatise help-seeking.
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