By Irene van der Kloet
We can all agree that our health is one of our greatest assets, both physically and mentally. The Alberta Health Services funded program HYPE (Helping Young People Excel) focuses on mental health for young people and families. One of fifty-five across the province, the program is offered through the Redwater School and Ochre Park School in Redwater and is coordinated by Carina Chenoweth. “The program’s overall goal is to enhance mental health and its protective factors around children, youth and families. Most of our program is school based, so the 5-18 range would be the majority of what we do, but we offer early learning programs in the community for 0-5. We also offer some parenting programs obviously for adults and a program called “Find Your Village” for anyone in Sturgeon County; they don’t have to be parents or caregivers or part of the school community,” Carina explains.
A big part is to be visible in the community. The program partners with anybody willing to partner, such as Redwater community services, the Art Society, the library, the schools, indigenous agencies around the community, and Sturgeon Community Services. Any time there is an event in the community, like the Kris Kringle event, they participate.
Central to the program is to promote mental health and especially to shift the culture from an illness culture to a wellness culture. “When we think of physical health, we think of nutrition, diet, exercise etc., pillars of health, but with mental health, we always default to illness, anxiety, suicide, so the biggest thing we are hoping to accomplish here is to make that shift so that when people think mental health, they are thinking wellness, they are moving from an illness to a wellness perspective. We all experience mental health. It’s part of being human; how do we nurture and support it and build those protective factors,” Carina adds. The program is part of a continuum of health support: Some people need a higher level than what prevention and promotion can offer, the intention is to facilitate those pathways to care for people that need a higher level of intervention, but most of the work is school based. On a PD Day, while young people are not in school, they offer an event for young people to participate. When school is out for the summer, they offer a program for ages pre-school and up throughout July and August.