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Looking for Resilience: On What Matters Most to Improve the Mental Health of Populations
The study of resilience in individuals has focused on the genetic factors or the inter-personal factors that confer vulnerability, or, conversely, protect individuals, when faced with adversity. Population mental health however is determined both by aggregates of the factors that shape individual mental health, and by factors that have no individual-level analog.
It is likely that a complex web of individual and group-level factors that inter-relate dynamically shapes resilient population mental health. From a practical point of view, however, we are interested in understanding the factors that might matter most to the production of resilient populations. How then do we understand what matters mostto improve the mental health in populations?
The 2015 Rema Lapouse award winner will build on these questions and explore how theoretical and mathematical illustrations can be used to develop a formalism that can help explicate the production of resilient populations. He will address how we can better understand the relative weight of factors that produce better health within and across populations in the aftermath of adversity. Dr. Galea will conclude with some thoughts on practical applications of this work and on potentially fruitful directions for scholarship in the field.
Learning Areas:
Biostatistics, economicsEpidemiology
Public health administration or related administration
Public health or related public policy
Public health or related research
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health
Learning Objectives:
Identify the factors that matter most to the production of resilient populations.
Explain how population mental health is determined both by aggregates of the factors that shape individual mental health, and by factors that have no individual-level analog.
Describe how we can better understand the relative weight of factors that produce better health within and across populations in the aftermath of adversity.
Keyword(s): Biostatistics, Epidemiology
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the 2015 recipient of the Rema Lapouse Award for Lifetime Achievement in Epidemiology, Mental Health and Applied Research Statistics. Dr Galea is a physician and an epidemiologist. He is Dean and Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. Prior to his appointment at Boston University, Dr Galea served as the Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.