The Marblehead Mental Health Task Force assembled virtually Monday, June 26. After approving minutes about Healthy Kids Day from a meeting back in April, Chair Joanne Miller got right to the agenda’s first topic: the need to develop a strategic plan.
Dr. Mark Libon, professor and clinical training officer at Salem State University, explained why he feels a strategic plan is necessary for the task force to achieve its long-term goals.
“To be honest, it really wasn’t clear relative to the direction that the task force was moving in, and what the focus of the task force was,” Libon said. “I have been in many organizations where we have essentially taken a step back and met as an entire group and have a conversation about what is the overall mission of the organization or the task force.”
Libon said that developing a mission statement would give the task force more of an identity, likening the statement to a “North Star.”
“It’s setting a really clear direction with deliverables and things that would be accomplished, and a time frame for those,” Libon explained.
He theorized that the development of these goals could lead to the creation of subcommittees within the task force.
Attendee Wendy Kent shared a philosophical idea termed “the science of the positive” that she learned at a conference in Montana. She believes it has the potential to benefit not only those the task force seeks to help, but also the task force itself.
“So much of what we do, including youth health surveys, is often deficit-based,” Kent said. “This particular model very heavily emphasizes shifting the narrative to focusing on assets, resources, and positive community norms instead of just regular social norms … there’s a huge discrepancy between what people think is going on and what is actually going on.”
Kent suggested that this approach can better highlight those who are on the right path in their mental health journeys, as well as prevent burnout for researchers who are, by default, usually focused on the negative perspective in their studies.
“Working in this field, inevitably we get bogged down with the stuff that’s broken,” Kent said. “It appealed to me because I’m a ‘glass half-full’ kind of person, but I was becoming a ‘glass half-empty’ kind of person.”
“The science of the positive” was also brought up as a way to analyze the research on adolescents that the task force conducts in gathering its youth risk-behavior data, which is compiled so that Marblehead can understand the challenges facing its youth and then address those challenges. The task force agreed that qualitative data is much more valuable than quantitative in these kinds of studies. Qualitative data gives more personal insight into each prospective youth participant, while also providing them with a “safe space” to talk about their challenges.
Miller noted that youth are currently vulnerable and the recent social-media backlash against Pride Month events did not help. Member Melissa Kaplowitch added that the task force should focus on implementing civil discourse in the future to minimize hate across all platforms.
“I think that maybe we ought to think about how this task force can be a leader in just carving out civil discourse as a whole,” Kaplowitch said. “When comments go out on social media, it hurts many people. The people who are reading comments and having their own private pain, are the people who are most at risk … Mental health in general in this community has been so impacted by the lack of civil discourse.”
Marblehead Counseling Center’s Teri McDonough is working on getting a speaker who specializes in civil discourse to come work with the task force this fall.
Before the virtual meeting adjourned, Miller and the task force agreed to officially craft a strategic plan on July 24.