Global Mental Health Reflection
While selecting my elective for the fall 2023 semester at The New School, I was presented with the opportunity to take Child and Adolescent Global Mental Health. This course provided a hands-on learning experience that immediately caught my attention. Being a first-year student, I was eager to gain new experiences working on a global mental health scale, and I quickly learned that this course was the perfect opportunity to do so. The class challenged students to develop a culturally relevant and sustainable intervention to improve mental health in our chosen region.
Getting to know my NGO was undoubtedly one of the highlights of this project. My group had the privilege of communicating with our NGO through weekly Zoom meetings. We were able to collaborate with the NGO and a group of students local to the community. Their generous contributions influenced the depths we could reach in creating our deliverable. Collaborating each week in one-on-one meetings allowed us to explore the many strengths in their community; this communication was necessary to understand the demographic that would be using our product. Our group quickly learned that we would need to build a product created for and by the user. Meaning the contents of the deliverable would have to align with the needs of the community. Our creation would have to be based upon the communities’ strengths and cultural beliefs if we wanted it to be truly sustainable.
Learning about the community through an academic lens was especially important. During the beginning stages of the project, we spent much time gathering information about interventions previously conducted in the region. Examining their designs’ strengths and weaknesses helped us navigate this process ourselves.
Many classes throughout the semester hosted guest speakers who shared valuable insights from their experience working on a global scale. Hearing professionals sharing their expertise and personal stories highlighted the intricacies of developing user-friendly designs. Being able to draw from their experiences and ask them questions pertaining to our work was highly effective and unique to any other course I have been a part of. Another distinctive feature of the course pertained to the diversity of the students enrolled. Both students from a psychology background and a design background were able to collaborate. This interdisciplinary partnership helped me to learn about new concepts I had never considered before. As a team, we leveraged our individual backgrounds in psychology and design to formulate a robust deliverable.
