This year’s Health Disparities Week kicked off on Monday with a lecture from keynote speaker Tamar Mendelson of the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her lecture, titled “Promoting Social and Emotional Well Being in Urban Youth,” stressed the social determinants of mental health.
Every year, the Hopkins Organization for Pre-Health Education (HOPE) hosts Health Disparities Week in order to raise awareness about various issues. The central topic this year is mental health.
“There’s a lot of evidence that stress contributes to mental health disorders, especially unipolar depression and some forms of anxiety,” Mendelson said in an interview with The News-Letter. “There are some mental health disorders that are more genetically or biologically based, but many of them have a large component of responses to the environment.”
In her lecture, Mendelson pointed out that children growing up in poverty are exposed to chronic stress over time and that this stress can lead to disruptions in cognitive and emotional regulation capacities.
Moreover, she suggested that treatment for mental health is rare.
“Very few people who need mental health services receive them,” Mendelson said. “The numbers are pretty appalling. Most do not receive treatment and even the people who do receive treatment aren’t receiving adequate treatment.”
One way Mendelson has tried to address these issues, and to prevent potential mental health disorders in young children, is by partnering with the Holistic Life Foundation.
The Holistic Life Foundation, based in Baltimore, is a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the well-being of people living in underserved neighborhoods by educated Baltimore Public School children about mindfulness-based approaches to stress. The most common of these approaches is yoga.
Yoga, according to Mendelson, is an effective way to reduce and prevent chronic stress. Self-reports suggest that yoga and meditation exercises can be responsible for positive improvements in mental health.
Mendelson did point out certain challenges to introducing mindfulness practices in the Baltimore city schools.
“I think the biggest barrier to introducing any kind of program is just how overworked everyone is and how you need resources of both people’s time and often financial supports as well,” she said.
However, there are ways Hopkins students could get involved in reducing such barriers and spreading awareness about the necessity of mental health treatment.
“There are various mental health groups that are all starting to come together, and there are different clubs you can join,” sophomore Julia Felicione said. “I think the best thing people can do is to be open and honest about their issues, because there is still a big stigma around mental health and mental health issues themselves.”
Raising awareness for mental health could also have implications for helping students at Hopkins cope with the workload.
“At college ages, actually, a lot of times people have vulnerability to psychotic episodes, which develops in adolescence and goes up in college years,” Mendelson said.
“I’ve noticed the amount of work here definitely perpetuates a lot of issues that, if they were mild before, they could become worse, because now people are in this really intense academic environment which they may not be used to,” Felicione said.
More than anything, Felicione stressed the importance of seeking help for mental health disorders.
“For me I feel the more people speak up about them and the more people talk about them and make them commonplace, the easier it will be for people to get help. There will be less amount of time people have to suffer in silence,” she said.
Following the lecture from Mendelson on Monday, HOPE hosted a Cards for Care event on Tuesday, during which students wrote cards to mental health patients in the Baltimore area.
The Mental Health Fair will take place in Charles Commons at 6 p.m. on Thursday. HOPE will wrap up Health Disparities Week with their Brain Foods event all day on Friday at the Breezeway.
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