Here I Am: National Mental Health project – Jordan (IFMSA-Jo)

Name of the activity: Here I Am: National Mental Health project

Country/NMO: Jordan (IFMSA-Jo)

Program: Mental Health

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Campaign

General description:

Here I Am is a national project from IFMSA-Jo about mental health.
The project discusses mental health and its’ misconceptions through awareness steps, workshops, lectures, and training sessions, and uses brochures as its’ main materials, and feedback forms as the main source of feedback from the target groups.
With over 15 steps in 1 year, Here I Am managed to gain its’ goal of raising awareness about mental health all around Jordan, and managed to get enough feedback from the society to start working on its’ own mental health study, and even went on to win the EMR 14th’s activities fair!

Focus area:

Mental Health advocacy and public awareness

Problem statement:

To address mental health to the society, in general, while giving some insights and statistics in Jordan as of late, alongside misconceptions that the society makes about mental health, scientifically, and opinion-wise, while mentioning some of the most major mental issues that students face but never know about sometimes!

Target groups and beneficiaries:

Society, when it comes to misconceptions.
Students, when it comes to mental issues.

Objectives and indicators of success:

The main goal was to basically address the stigma, and misconceptions about mental health to the society, in general, and especially to the students.
We’d measure success through taking feedback from those we attend to in our awareness events, workshops, training sessions, etc…, whether they’re usual citizens, or students in schools/universities.
Indicators of success are obviously the results of our feedback forms, which view how much did the participants and target group benefit from the project.

Methodology:

Awareness campaigns all around the nation to raise awareness about mental health, misconceptions, info about it, and some vital tips on how to approach mental health for yourself, and for your loved ones.
Training sessions and workshops on multiple sensitive topics regarding mental health, such as emotional intelligence, media, drugs, communication skills, anger-stress-time management, etc…
Conferences and lectures about multiple topics about mental health that would benefit students all around the nation in universities and schools.

Plans for evaluation:

For our project, we would work on pre-event, and post-event feedback forms and distribute them digitally to, not only our attendees in workshops and training sessions, or the people who attend our booths during awareness events, but also to our volunteers!
In the feedback forms, we discuss what they expect coming into this project, in terms of activities, what they’ll do, what they’ll learn, if they think the society will accept them, if the training session will discuss the topics on their minds, and then, we ask the participants (Volunteers and training/workshop attendees.) what they learnt from the project, how was the quality of the content that the project offered, if the project met their expectations, what they would like to see added or removed in the future events/sessions/workshops.