Promoting Mental Health and Emotional Well-being Among Children and Youth: A Role for Community Child Health?
Author(s)
Alperstein, G.; Raman S.
Abstract
Most of the research on the determinants of the health and well-being of populations have focused on physical health problems, particularly mortality and life expectancy. There is less research on the ‘upstream’ (socioeconomic) determinants of mental health problems, and even less on emotional well-being and enhancing ‘coping’ or promoting resilience. Examples of upstream determinants of mental health problems include good evidence linking the prevalence of mental health problems of children and young people to income, educational status and family structure (Sawyer et al. 2001). Male youth suicide has been linked to such upstream determinants as relative unemployment rates. Suicide has increased with increasing ratio of youth to overall unemployment rates (Morrell et al. 2001). A significantly higher risk of suicide in Australia over the past century was shown to be associated with conservative governments compared with social democratic government tenures (Page et al. 2002).
