The MindFlu Project
Quality Education
Nearly 800,000 suicides occurred worldwide in 2015. According to a research in 2015, about 29.2% of Malaysians, aged 16 and above are having mental problems.The incline rate of common mental illnesses such as anxiety disorder and depression cases starting in youth is undeniable. However, this issue seems to get fewer spotlights than it deserves. Stereotyping of public on mental illness issues is real problem happening in Malaysia. This often leads to unwillingness of one to seek for professional help. Besides, it also causes one to not share their feeling and thus getting less support from their loved one. In other cases, family or their close one is the major issue that leads to mental illness. Their closed one is those who discriminate them. This situation definitely hurt them more and make it worst. On the other hand, for the public who wanted to give a hand and concern about mental health in Malaysia, they couldn’t find a proper way to offer help.
Overview of Issue / Background
Nearly 800,000 suicides occurred worldwide in 2015. According to a research in 2015, about 29.2% of Malaysians, aged 16 and above are having mental problems.
The incline rate of common mental illnesses such as anxiety disorder and depression cases starting in youth is undeniable. However, this issue seems to get fewer spotlights than it deserves. Stereotyping of public on mental illness issues is real problem happening in Malaysia. This often leads to unwillingness of one to seek for professional help. Besides, it also causes one to not share their feeling and thus getting less support from their loved one.
In other cases, family or their close one is the major issue that leads to mental illness. Their closed one is those who discriminate them. This situation definitely hurt them more and make it worst.
On the other hand, for the public who wanted to give a hand and concern about mental health in Malaysia, they couldn’t find a proper way to offer help.
Project Objectives (Vision & Mission)
We wanted to increase the understanding of public about the daily life of mentally ill one. By that, we wanted to reduce the stereotyping of public and thus improve the life’s quality of them.
Moreover, we wanted to also raise the participation of public in mental health by offering resources or project idea to the public as well as connected them to the mentally ill one.
Project Details (Activities and Tasks)
Mindflu workshop
A workshop that design for youth to help them in organizing their own mental health event or project in their school. We will introduce them to some of the mental illness through simulation game and guiding them on how to organizing a mental health event in their school.
(Simulation games)
During the simulation game, the participants will get to experience what mentally ill one feels and suffers. By experience the symptoms; participant will have deeper impression on the activities. One of the simulation game examples is schizophrenia.
Facilitators choose half number of participants from each group as schizophrenia patients and ask them wait outside the room. They will be assigned to table A, B and C.The other participants will act as the “inner voice” of the patients. They will be given a note sentences and required to read out loud the sentence in order to interrupt the patients. These “inner voice” participants will sit alternatively between the patients. The rest 6 participants will act as interrupter and physically disturb (eg. As listed in the “Material” below) the patients throughout the session. They are required to walk around the tables. After allowing patients to come in, they need to listen to the instruction of instructor to complete the task given.
Simulation game that we have created last year during 1.0 Mindflu workshop included Schizophrenia, Anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) collaborated with Malaysia Mental Health Association (MMHA). While this year we are going to create simulation game on depression and some other mental illnesses.
After the workshop, we compile all the simulation game into a module and provide access to public so it can be used as a guideline for those who intend to organize mental health project.
Self-harm prevention mobile application
It is an application that can buddy up people according to age and interest. Upon registration, one needs to undergo a test to identify their intention and level of illness. After that, one will be buddy up with another person. They can provide mental support for each other and reduces the rate of self-harm. Besides, the app also includes classes which recommended by psychologist or psychiatry that can improve their level of energy.
Expected Project Result & Outcomes
- Participants of the workshop can understand more about mentally ill one.
- Increase the number of mental health project in Malaysia.
- Reduces stereotyping of public about mental illness.
- Adjust simulation game to make it more reliable.
- Mobile application buddies up to 200 people.
0% of RM1.00 Goal
Project Information
University name | : | UCSI University |
Project leader name | : | Foo Hui Ying |
Beneficiary | : | 81 |
Section I
- We aim to raise awareness about the importance of mental health and to break stereotypes about mental illness.
- We managed to raise fund from Youth Beyond Boundaries (YBB), a fraternity led by students. We are very grateful that the YBB decided to be a part of us for the MindFlu Workshop. The objective of raising awareness among youth about mental health turned out to be a success through the Khind Starfish Foundation sponsorship and YBB collaboration. We will be insufficient if it were not for the sponsored.
- Inevitably, we faced many challenges throughout the process of the MindFlu workshop. Firstly, we had to amend the whole microflow of the workshop than the initial plan. The Initial plan were designed to a whole day workshop however through intermediate party feedback concerning that having a whole day workshop is exhausting and energy drained for the participants. After a thorough consideration, we decided to modify the duration into a half day workshop. Secondly, we experienced obstacle that involve our workshop’s venue. The the reservation made prior via facility management were used for the other college’s activities. As a result, we had to reorganise our floor plan into one venue. Furthermore, we faced technical issues while creating our application. We had to create it from scratch as well as validating the information we need to find out the psychiatric services and the details provided in Klang Valley.
The endeavour of the application was due to budget constraint. We had to create the application by ourselves as the budget allocation for the app development was inadequate. This led us to inability to hire a professional in helping us for the app development.
- The latter problem we faced were language and culture barriers. As our participants come from universal backgrounds, there were boundaries of language comprehension. During our workshop, our participants constituted of secondary school students as well as refugees. Since our participants were secondary school students, they may seldom or never have been exposed to the scientific terminology nor names of any possible mental disorders. They might have difficulties in understanding our intent message delivered. Moreover, the proficiency of English might be challenging for the refugees’ participants. Thus, they may undergone difficulties in communicating and understanding the message delivered by speakers.
- We appreciate that the success of our workshop rendered in addition to the various challenges. Furthermore, upon the shortcoming to redesigned our program flow. As a saying goes, “All's well that ends well.” ― William Shakespeare, we received positive feedbacks from our participants in the view of our simulation games and also the talks from speakers. Also, we also receive good comment from our speakers after their participation in the simulation games. In addition, we are happy that we were able to launch our app even though encountering piles of problem, although there are still progressing minor improvements.
- As mentioned earlier, the people who benefitted from our project are the secondary student who attended our workshop and also people who uses our app. Besides, we believe that there will be getting more people benefitted from us as we are going to publish a module. The module ia a basic tool-kit for the simulation games that we created during workshop. Inside the module, there will be the simulation games’ process and explanation of it which would help the participants and other organisation conducting it in their events in the future and spread the knowledge of mental health.
- The sustainability of this project is an ongoing venture in which the development and delivery of the primary goal are never questioned. Future development would be consistent with events, workshop, outreach programme and renowned for its own social impact via the recent invention of the application as well as social media infiltration of Facebook MindFlu page. This two medium will be a constant platform to reach out to the public awareness on mental health and break their stereotype on mental illness.
Section II
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- One of the main programs in our project is the MinFlu Workshop. Our participants gained various knowledge regarding mental health through talk by clinical psychologist, sharing sessions by ex-patients and fun simulation games from the workshop. They learnt new mental disorders such as obsessive & compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and more aware about mental illness. Public knowledge is very important in accessing community resources. As there is more demand from public, it can produce a flow of attention. This attention can result a great changes for those suffer from mental illness.
In addition, we had launched our MindFlu app during MindFlu workshop. The public are entitled to download it from play store and get information about the psychiatrist services offer in Klang Valley. This app makes our life more convenient as people can easily find which psychiatric clinic or hospital provide the right services accordingly. We believed that all the effort we contributed will interexhagebaly bring awareness to the community.
Before we organized the workshop, we did several researches and studies. We realise that the number of people suffering mental illness are gradually increased but the public are still unaware about this and have misconceptions towards mental illness. Stigma of mental illness is a major barrier to psychological treatment because it prevents people from seeking help. Delay in treatment may be dangerous because it may lead to a more severe condition and would result in drastic account of activities. Throughout this project, we truly understand that mental illness which seems beyond from us where we usually found exposed them from dramas. We learnt that in social environment, mental health individual suffers might just be somewhere next to us. Hence, we sincerely hope that this project is able to change the way people think of mental illness.
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- MindFlu Project is beyond community service and create awareness for mental health. It is where enthusiasm, passion, building competency and happiness begins. The biggest take-away from this project will be "creating real impact is not easy, but teamwork makes it happened". (Lee Yee Jeat)
Never do things for the sake of doing it, put your heart in, your tears in, your time, efforts, empathy and love into it. You will eventually realize that all the things you decided to do turns out amazing from the inside and out. All the memorable feelings and impact you've made is pure and meaningful; they can last forever. (Yong Jeat Yen)
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