An article published in today's edition of The Chronicle Herald:
Pilot project could be coming to Digby County high schools in new year
By Brian Medel, Yarmouth Bureau
High school curriculum designed to teach students about mental illness may be coming to Digby County classrooms in January as a pilot project.
"This is new," said John Roswell, one of the program co-ordinators with the Digby-Clare Mental Health Volunteers Association.
"We hope to do it during the 2009-2010 school year, hopefully beginning in January," Mr. Roswell said about the project that will be conducted in four local high schools.
He hopes the curriculum will someday be included in all Nova Scotia high schools.The curriculum was prepared by Dr. Stan Kutcher [pictured] in co-operation with the Canadian Mental Health Association.
"This is really a wonderful opportunity," said Dr. Kutcher, an adolescent mental health expert at Dalhousie University’s school of medicine.
The course will give students information on how the brain works and tell them how to maintain good mental health. Suicide prevention and depression will also be discussed, Dr. Kutcher said Tuesday.
He’ll help teachers better understand mental illness and the new curriculum in special workshops that will be held before the start of the course.
"They’ve been very enthusiastic about this," said Dr. Kutcher.
Next week, staff from the Education and Health departments, along with representatives from local school boards and health authority, will gather in Digby to talk about the new high school course and how it will be implemented.
"We’re not quite sure where it will fit . . . that’s part of what this discussion is going to be about," said Mr. Roswell. "We hope to make (it) a larger project . . . an overall approach to addressing adolescent mental health.
"We’re trying to create a dialogue around this issue in the community and make it OK for people to talk about mental health and mental illness."
Mr. Roswell said 80 per cent of all psychiatric disorders emerge in adolescence. He had mental illness as a young person but was undiagnosed until the age of 40.
"My life would have been so much different had I been diagnosed as a teenager," he said.
