Mental healthcare is an intricate process driven by multiple factors in a person’s life. Therefore, creating a single holistic mental health model is crucial to understanding how individuals react to events in their lives.

By doing so, organizations and communities can anticipate risks with protective factors. Specifically, an integrated model should include the genetic components (such as being susceptible to specific stressors) and their social-environmental experiences.

While genetics are beyond a person’s control, there are ways to maximize protective factors to improve resilience. That’s where decision-makers can come in to offer specialized support that reduces the frequency and severity of mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.

A “Chicken and Egg” Problem

People often associate biological decisions with mental health and mood. For example, a person might attribute the lack of sleep, poor nutrition, and lack of exercise to higher stress levels. However, it’s essential to consider the order of things — to understand the innate behavior that drives those biological decisions.

For example, why does a person skip meals? Why do some people prefer active lifestyles while others enjoy sedentary arrangements despite the widely discussed health issues associated with inactivity? There’s a need to dive deeper into the core of a person’s psyche — to identify the layers that make up the collective mindset.

And the foundation of that mindset comprises childhood experiences. Specifically, the circumstances in a person’s earliest years shape their reactions and responses in later life. Hence, an integrated mental health model focuses on the importance of childhood and its lingering psychological effects.

However, while biology (i.e., genetics) may result in a predisposition toward developing mental illness, every person has the potential to establish protective factors to overcome those natural inclinations.

Early Childhood Influences Mental Health

The collective childhood experience of individuals may determine how they react to events later in life and the decisions they make in response. These socio-environmental experiences may strengthen their reactions (e.g., establish confidence) or create stressful responses (e.g., psychosis, paranoia, and other faulty thought processes). Essentially, there’s a need to consider the lasting impact of childhood trauma.

While individuals remember positive memories in their entirety (e.g., adopting their first pet), they retain subjective fragments of traumatic childhood events, which they link to a specific circumstance. These fear-inducing fragments may take the form of sounds, images, movements, or physical sensations without meaningful context.

As such, traumas may build psychological anchors in a person’s life, leading to fear, phobia, and biased responses toward a given scenario. The anchoring process (and its associated responses) could then continue into later life, across significant milestones such as landing a new job or becoming a parent for the first time.

Assessing Risk Factors

The knock-on effects from childhood adversities alongside other accumulated risk factors will affect how individuals react to stressful events in their lives. Risk factors are the negative influences that aggravate stress responses, potentially leading to victimization and susceptibility to a crime or offense.

Common examples of risk factors include:

• Family distress because of miscommunication and abuse
• Racism
• Chronic illness
• Witnessing of neighborhood crime or family violence
• Unemployment
• A lack of positive role models
• Bullying
• Divorce/separations

For example, individuals with traumatic childhood episodes or experiencing cancer treatment may cope poorly with workplace conflicts or when losing their job, compared to someone with fewer risk factors. Some risk factors may create triggers of the past, leading to stress (e.g., genuine biological changes) and unhealthy behaviors. Individuals can learn more about themselves and their responses by identifying these factors and perhaps make more conscious decisions toward positive change.

The Power of Protective Factors

Protective factors are the opposite of risk factors, serving as positive influences in an individual’s life. For instance, individuals suffering from depressive episodes can cope better with their symptoms through increased socialization, boosting cognitive function, self-esteem, and overall happiness.

Some protective factors may involve timely interventions by parents, peers, and certified mental health professionals. Protective factors can help eliminate or mitigate the risk factors within communities and families. Some common examples of protective factors include:

• Providing peer and parental support from childhood, which drives healthy enthusiasm
• Offering parental supervision, such as encouraging non-judgmental communication techniques
• Encouraging success at school, with a focus on freedom, healthy competition, and recognition.
• Reinforcing positive values, beliefs, and attitudes via talks and discussions.

Tying it All Together

As society becomes increasingly complex and mental health remains a pressing issue, it’s time to consider the situation via an integrated model that drives people-specific solutions. By uniting biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors, organizations and communities can better assess the root cause of biased thinking processes.

More importantly, an integrated model enables individuals to identify risk factors and implement protective factors at the earliest given opportunity. Ultimately, a proactive and integrated vantage point will significantly reduce trauma and the adverse effects on a person’s life decisions and well-being.

CredibleMind — How We Optimize the Holistic Mental Health Model

Awareness is a vital component in maintaining optimal mental health, and awareness requires information. While information is available at the touch of a fingertip in the modern digital age, there is always a risk of inaccuracy, especially from unauthenticated sources. Your organization and community deserve the most reputable mental health resources to steer the most effective resilience strategies.

CredibleMind is an advanced evidence-based gateway that provides relevant and trustworthy data and information to help individuals cope with their mental health concerns. 50% of adults face mental conditions sometime in their life, while 1 in 5 people deal with symptoms each year. With CredibleMind, you can take a giant step toward “fixing the system” in your organization and community without the guesswork.

How can thinking holistically help with your mental health programs?  Contact Scott Dahl to brainstorm how the CredibleMind platform might be a viable, affordable solution.

• scott@crediblemind.com
• 404-721-5964
• Find a convenient time on Scott’s calendar