Social, Emotional, and Mental Health Issues Related to HIV and AIDS

As a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre, HHD leads and carries out programs around the world that address the healthy development of young people. Our activities extend to South East Asia, (with an office in Bangkok), the Caribbean, and Southern Africa.

In South East Asia, we focus on children and young people infected with and affected by HIV and AIDS, and migrant workers, who are often at risk of sexual exploitation and HIV infection.

In the Caribbean, with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), we are strengthening the capacity of the education sector to address HIV and AIDS through policy, programs, and services. In particular, we focus on guidance counselors and teachers, who play a very important role in students’ physical and mental health.

In Africa, we work with Education International, the global teachers union, to address grief and bereavement from loss due to HIV, as well as economic and cultural patterns that place people at
risk.

In all of our HIV and AIDS work, the social, emotional, and mental health of caregivers, teachers, infected persons, and orphaned and infected children is central to our concerns.

Addressing Social, Emotional, and Mental Health Through Schools and Communities
On behalf of WHO’s Global School Health Initiative, HHD develops materials, provides training, and conducts research and evaluation to advance the Health Promoting School approach through curriculum, the school’s psycho-social and physical environments, and the availability of services—all of which must address students’ social, emotional, and mental health.

In collaboration with WHO, UNESCO, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), HHD has created materials and training for life skills development. Skills for Health: Skills-based Health Education Including Life Skills: An Important Component of a Child-Friendly/Health Promoting School (a 90-page downloadable report, available as a PDF) promotes mental health, with the goal of strengthening efforts to implement quality skills-based health education on a national scale.

To assess the psycho-social environments of schools and enable staff to plan improvements, HHD was part of a Health-Promoting Schools project in Zhejiang Province, China, where the The Psycho-Social Profile (PDF) was used for evaluation purposes. The profile (which is described in the "Creating an Environment for Emotional and Social Well-Being: An Important Responsibility of a Health-Promoting and Child Friendly School" document) assesses seven quality areas that characterize a healthy psycho-social environment.

Another HHD partner is the Universal Education Foundation (UEF), which is dedicated to education by all for the well-being of children. With HHD, UEF is developing tools to capture the voices of children—their perceptions of how learning environments, including schools, information, communication, technology, and the media, affect their health and well-being. With the involvement of young people, the findings are then presented to policy-makers and program planners to engage them in a dialogue about ways to improve the learning environment to benefit the well-being of youth. A significant piloting of the tools developed around this approach and instruments has already taken place in Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon and will soon begin in the United Kingdom, specifically, in Wales.