We, the undersigned individuals focused on SDG 3, Promoting Health and Well-being. We emphasized on mental health care and most especially the role of emotions in mental health or how our emotions affect our mental health. People facing challenges with their mental health find it difficult to seek help from counselors and people around them like their loved ones due to the negative beliefs, silence and mismanagement of emotions surrounding health conditions. Young people poorly manage their emotions on a regular basis and this puts their mental health at a state of risk. This will further lead to other unwanted actions like drug abuse and suicide.
During the semester long Millennium fellowship program, we learnt to create a significant impact in the lives of our audience. We had training sessions which helped us to build meaningful relationships and focus on the shared core values of Empathy, Humility and Inclusion when dealing with one another and the people we want to create an impact and advocate for social change in. With the acquired leadership skills from the continuous training sessions, we set SMART goals and worked on design thinking for impact.
With skills in “Honing our pitches”, we set out ready to impact the students of the Faculty of Health Sciences in the University of Buea, Cameroon, on some proper emotion management techniques in order to promote mental well being. After individual and collective research, we briefly and clearly made specific to our audience which mostly comprised mostly of first year medical students, the relationship between our emotions and our mental health. Also we explained how emotional health affects mental health; identifying the problem and how to manage your emotions to promote mental well being; a solution to the problem.
With the help of a power point presentation, we were able to clearly reach out to an audience of more than 70 students. We gave examples on how emotions can lead to mood disorders, anxiety disorders, stress, low self esteem, strained relationships and irrational decisions. We advised our audience to practice empathy, enhance emotional intelligence, practice empathy and self-care, to communicate more and to seek therapy unashamed.
We could feel the impact we created because our goal was SMART; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. We knew our audience, we did research, we were clear and brief.
We strongly believe that collaborative action and inclusive participation are essential for achieving the UN's SDGs most especially SDG 3.