I had a chance to participate in a virtual internship at Think Pacific to produce a report that maps out monthly awareness of mental illnesses for Psychiatric Survivors association. The motivation for developing a toolkit is to teach Fijians carers and families self-care strategy to look after themselves, as well as arrest the exacerbation of psychiatric conditions for early intervention. The goal of the task is to have an array of resources publishable on social media each month. We decided to choose infographic as our medium for its ease of sharing, engaging yet informative nature.
The first challenge of the project was to select common mental health conditions in Fiji to define our scope. The research process has broadened my cultural awareness as I learnt that Fiji had a high suicide rate. For example, some Fijian may suffer from the shame of perceived failure and lose hope for their future. Due to globalization, Fijians mobilized to different cities and became less in touch with their community, which makes it difficult for them to maintain the traditional aspects of their culture. Additionally, youths also experience stress from school, and clash with elderly at home due to conflicts in lifestyle. Furthermore, modern demands have transformed the traditional lifestyles of men and women, leading to stress as they are confronted with family expectations. The combination of intergenerational and familial conflicts may help to explain the statistics of suicide in Fiji.
The second challenge of the project is to repackage our research of mental illnesses into palatable bitesize infographics. However, the intricate differences between mental conditions are governed by clinical criteria as well specific jargon. Grasping the intuition behind psychiatric lexicon requires more than dictionary definitions. For instance, grief is an emotional response to loss with concomitant depressive symptoms. However, depression symptoms are not ascribed to a specific loss, and instead arises from a deterioration of function and increasing isolation. Likewise, major depressive disorders with mild presentation is not the same as minor depression, owing to some objective diagnostic criteria. Therefore, dejargoning the description of mental illnesses takes up the bulk of the cognitive load; other times, it was, too a pleasure to experiment with different colour schemes, typographies and spatial arrangements, thereby creating appealing posters.
Lastly, our group had a presentation examining whether global approaches could be applied to solve local problems. We examined this from an environmental, political, and healthcare perspectives using Fiji as a focal point. We agreed that international humanitarian aids have been essential in addressing multi-sectoral needs of Fiji. Countries must make concerted efforts to solve boundless environmental issues as no policies of one country could single-handedly apprehend the deterioration of climate change.
Overall, the internship at Think Pacific is a rare opportunity to examine local issues in Fiji at depth and also contribute to promoting mental health education.