Online Program

Oral

Resilience is the capacity to recover from an insult. In the context of mental health, resilience in individuals typically refers to a person’s or a population’s capacity to maintain, or return to, good mental health, after traumatic event exposures or other adverse experiences. The study of resilience in individuals has focused on genetic or 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. The 2015 Rema Lopouse Award lecture will explore how we understand what matters most to improve the mental health in populations. Sandro Galea MD,MPH,DrPH, will address the use of theoretical and mathematical illustrations to develop a formalism that can help explicate the production of resilient populations. He will discuss 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.

Session 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.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH) , Masters Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES)