Promotion

104 MENTAL HEALTH PROMOTION
low social connectedness and high environmental threat, pointing to the importance
of social bonds and cognitive skills to effectively appraise threat. Increased anxiety is
a cause for concern because it tends to predispose individuals to depression (Twenge
2000).
A final consideration flows through this chapter. It is the stigmatizing that occurs
when young people are solely viewed through the lens of risk and problems. Care is
needed so that focusing on the determinants of mental health and mental illness, such
as economic or social disadvantage, does not highlight the possibility of failure. Rather
that the agency of young people achieving success is the theme, looking at success and
variations in the strategies young people use to manage threat and challenge in an
active way.
Box 5.1 Summary points for mental health, adolescents and young adults
• One in twenty young people worldwide experience developmental, emotional or
behavioural problems.
• Young adults have particularly high levels of mental health problems and illnesses.
• Viewing young people through the lens of risk limits mental health promotion action.
• Intersectoral action is crucial for mental health promotion for young people.
• Labelling young people in terms of risk and problems can be stigmatizing.
Theories and frameworks related to adolescents and young adults
Risk factor research currently predominates for young people skewing the focal point to
mental health problems. The orientation of most interventions is individuals, risk
behaviours, and problems such as poor social skills and low self-esteem. Judging an
individual’s mental health by absence of risk factors and problems of individuals is a
narrow approach. A challenge is the conceptualizing of positive mental health for these
age groups focusing on contexts and process such as school connectedness, whole
populations such as the school community, and organizational change that creates
supportive environments. This is a ‘population health’ approach which involves ‘simultaneous
consideration of the needs and goals of population groups inhabiting the
community, and the examination of the conditions of life that enhance or impede
their health or the health of the community’ (McMurray 1999: 9).
One current popular theoretical framework is resilience, used as a descriptor for
positive mental health and well-being. It has been conceived and described in different
ways that focus on individual traits and supportive environments, and on the outcome
and process of resilience (Olsson et al. 2003). Consideration of resilience and young
people has emerged from observation and research that indicates that a proportion of
young people have positive outcomes despite having faced diverse potentially harmful
life experiences. The early resiliency research arose from phenomenological descriptions
of the characteristics of young people who survived adversity while living in high
risk environments (Werner and Smith 1982). From this research resilient qualities of
individuals and the support conditions that predicted personal and social success were