 Hello and welcome to HealthFocus, a production of the Ministry of Health and Wellness. I am Fener Neptune. Today, we have with us the Mental Health Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, Nurse Alicia Sejiz, who will provide us with information on mental health and mental wellness. Welcome to the programme. Thank you for having me. Before we get into the discussion as it relates to mental health or wellness, perhaps you could tell us what is mental health or mental wellness? According to WHO, it says that mental health is a state of well-being in which the individual realises his or her own abilities, can cope with normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully and is able to make a contribution to their community. So mental health is where you're well-being, you have a balance, you're able to function, you're able to relate to others, you're able to work, you're able to help others. So that will be mental health. Okay, and why is it important for a person to actually maintain their mental health or their wellness? Okay, you cannot say that you're completely healthy if you don't, even not mentally healthy because you need your mind, your mental health helps you think, so you'll be able to make decisions, correct decisions, correct choices. You'll be able to interact properly, have good relationships, you'll be able to function well at your job, be productive, you will have good self-esteem, it builds up your self-esteem. So in order, if you're mentally healthy, then you'll need a more productive and healthy life. Okay, so would you say that everyone should actually maintain his or her mental health? Yes, we all should, all throughout the lifespan, from infant to adulthood, we should all work on maintaining our mental health. Okay, and what are some of the types of situations that will actually affect a person's mental health? Well, when you look at mental health, mental health is like a continuum. At one end you have mental health and at the other end you have mental illness. So like we go, day to day we go up and down on the continuum. We just want to stay above the midline. So you have mental health at one end and mental illness at the other end. So things that would affect our mental health, if we don't sleep well, we cannot concentrate. If we extra stress, if we highly stress and we don't relieve our stress, if we sad, we go through a loss, grief, a loss, sadness and we're not able to cope or not able to deal with it, examinations and all of these things will take us a little bit down the continuum in our mental health. But most people are able to bounce back. That's one thing about mental health, able to bounce back towards the healthy side of mental health. Okay. So you're saying that although somebody might go through a period of time where they might be stressed and the mental health might be affected, there is a possibility that they could get back to their normal self? Yes, there is a possibility. Okay. And would you say that anxiety, stress, depression, all of these would contribute, actually contribute to somebody's mental health? Yes. Anxiety, our feelings of anxiety, sadness, depression, all of these would affect our mental health. But the thing with it is that we're able to deal with these situations, these conditions and able to come back to mental health. Okay. Would you say that mental health problems would affect a specific gender or is it something would you say, yes, that it affects everyone? Is it does it go with gender, race, education? What does it, if you could explain a little more in there. Okay. Mental health issues, mental health problems, would affect everyone. But there are certain conditions, like they say depression is more prominent in women, whereas schizophrenia, another mental illness is more prominent in males and the age difference depends on the condition will differ. So depends on the mental condition, these it will differ. Okay. And what are some ways in which persons can actually maintain their mental health? Okay. Maintaining your mental health. First of all, you have to know who you are, learn yourself, know who you are, take care of yourself, take care of yourself, you take time to relax, some me time, know what gets you angry, what gets you sad, what makes you happy. Okay. Learn your emotions. So like say, if you know that you're going to get very angry, know what situations cause you to be angry and have a means to deal with these situations or deal with your feelings that you don't go to the extreme where you do something that you may regret later. Also use your words, should be able to talk, use your words how you feel, I feel this way or this is affecting me this way. So use your words. Okay. Healthy body, healthy mind. So you eat well, you exercise, that will help reduce your stress, make you feel good about yourself these ways. Make time for friends and for families. Sometimes we're so busy going about our daily lives. We always have something to do, work, work and we don't take time for our friends and families. So if something happens, these people are supposed to be our support system. If something happens to us, we don't, they are not there because we don't know when last we spoke to Tom or when last we spoke to Jill and we were looking for them to support us. But if we're on our way, we will pull our friends and our families with us, they help us build our foundation with them. If something happened to us, we don't have too far to go because our support system is right there, is right there to help us. Another thing causes a lot of stress is finance. So to avoid that stress, we create a meaningful budget. Sometimes we have needs, we have wants. So we focus on what we need and then our wants, if you have extra, we do what we do our wants. That will help reduce the stress, a lot of stress. Build confidence in yourself, like who you are. We all have our faults, we all have our abilities. We maintain our abilities and we try to work on our faults. Well, we are due for a break so I would definitely want you to hold on to that pot and we'll continue our discussion. Okay, thank you. We'll be back in a moment. Coronavirus? I am worried Gaza is only all people dying from that. Hold up. Being young does not mean being safe. Yes, it's true that the elderly are at higher risk but anyone can get the virus. The fact is even worse if you have a chronic condition like hypotension, heart disease, lung disease and diabetes or weakness in your immune system. If you are living with these conditions, be extra careful. Wash your hands with soap and water. Use hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol when hand washing is not possible. Avoid touching your face. Take steps to boost your immunity through proper nutrition, exercise, rest and take your medication as prescribed. Keep it being around people who have through symptoms, even close family members. Our health is in our hands. Together through simple actions, we can stop the spread of coronavirus. This message was brought to you by the Bureau of Health Education of the Ministry of Health and Wellness. Welcome back. We will continue our discussion with nurse Alicia Sejis on mental health or mental wellness. Before we took the break, you were discussing in terms of ways that people can actually maintain their mental health if you can continue this discussion. Okay. Where you left, you're looking at building your confidence. So we have to realize that we cannot do everything and what we can do, we do the best that we can do. Okay. We work on that one. You learn to be at peace with yourself. You practice mind-free less. Like they say, stop and smell the roses. When we're doing something, we're so preoccupied, we say multitasking, we don't stop and see exactly what's going on. So one thing, we can stop, ground ourselves. Let's look at five things that we have here right now. I can hear the birds. I can see the butterflies. Okay. Five things to ground yourself to make sure that you are there, mindfulness. Practice gratitude. Be thankful. In spite of the fact that something is wrong, we still have a lot of things that are right. So if every day we can think of five things that we are grateful for that happen to us for the day, we'll have a more positive attitude, a more positive outlook. Like you say, like another one, it comes up against take connected with others. Call your friend. Call your parents. Stay connected. Stay connected. We are sociable people. We need connection. We need to meet with people. We need to talk. Take connected. Practice your faith. We all want something to believe in. So whether it is whatever you believe in, you practice your faith. Take time off and practice your faith. Volunteer. Doing things to help others just because you can do it gives you a more sense of satisfaction and you do it because it's your work. So take time. Volunteer. Help others. Help others around us when you're able to. And lastly, ask for help. We are sometimes in life, we all need help and we should be able to ask for help. So these are some of the tips if we practice, we'll keep us on the way to keep us mentally healthy. So we can definitely see for somebody who wants to maintain their mental ability, there's a lot of them doing the work with themselves, doing getting involved in different activities as well. Yes. And you mentioned ask for help, one of the things that you mentioned. But for some persons they might feel okay, we've done all of those different things in terms of the exercise and getting involved in certain activities. But they feel that okay, I need more help. What services and does the Ministry of Health have available in the various communities? Okay. First of all, let me just start by saying our team in the community. Presently, we have three mental health psychiatrists practitioners in the community. We serve the island. We have three community mental health nurses and we have four community mental health aides. That is our team. And we provide clinics, one of them we provide clinics at each of the wellness centers. Okay. Anybody can access the services. The services are for free. You call or come in to make an appointment. If it's an emergency and it is required care, the nurse at the facility will find one of us and we'll get in contact with you. Okay. You don't need to be diagnosed with a mental illness or be a known client of the wellness center. You can come for help. Help is available. Like I say at each health center, including Denry hospital and Surfer hospital, there's a clinic at least once for the month. Some places there's clinic twice for the month, but most places is once for the month. These are the clinics. Okay. And the services we provide, like I said, we have mental health clinics. We have medication management, like persons who are on medication, persons who left the wellness center on medication. We assist with maintenance of the medication. We administer the medication. We do psychoeducation. We educate on the different conditions. We do health promotion, where we talk about the different medical mental conditions and how to maintain your mental health. We do community outreach. We do school outreach. So if you need us to come to talk to you, talk to your workplace, talk to your employees, you just call and make a date. And we come to give the lectures. We also do assessment of the pregnant family, where we look at the coping of the pregnancy, the coping after the pregnancy, so we can alleviate any problems later. We do counseling. We do home visits for persons who cannot come in. We go to the home. We go to do home visits. We do institution visits, like with Cornerstone, St. Lucy's Home, Comfort Bay. We do these visits. We do also street visits. Some of the communities and the streets go out on the streets to the people to give them the medication and to do checkup. Referrals, if we need the situation we cannot handle, we need more. We refer to the wellness center. If you need to refer to the private psychiatrists, if you need to refer to social services to welfare, depend on the problem because the whole thing will not be mentally ill, mental alone. They will have other issues that contribute, other social issues that contribute. So we do the necessary referrals. We also do initial assessments. If somebody is querying, maybe something is wrong, they can come in and we'll do initial assessment. We also do ongoing assessments of non-clients who has been discharged from the hospital. We do that also. So these are the some of the services that we offer. Great. I can definitely see that there are a lot of services available for our mental health awareness. Yes, they are. Thank you so much. Well, it was definitely a pleasure having you on the program today. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you very much. Well, that's how we come to the end of Health Focus, a production of the Ministry of Health and Wellness. I am Fernan Neptune, on behalf of the entire production team. Thanks for watching. Until next time.