Quotations from the Finnish Mental Health Strategy 2020-2030

The Finnish Mental Health Strategy treats mental health as a phenomenon that affects every person and needs to be addressed across society. Mental health is therefore fundamentally a positive resource, which is primarily intended to be maintained and supported. Society should therefore invest in those things that prevent mental disorders from developing, rather than focusing solely on treating mental disorders. This is also what we at Creativity Squads do, by helping people to find the means and direction for a meaningful life. To start the interview, I will present a sample of Finland’s mental health strategy 2020-2030. Sami describes the strategy as a guideline on which each Finnish government can base its own mental health programme. His interview starts halfway through the article.

“Mental health has become increasingly important in society. This is the result of major societal changes: technological development has accelerated, people are moving to cities and from one country to another, and values and lifestyles have become more diverse. In the workplace education and continuous learning have become increasingly important, and more and more people are working in jobs where high cognitive load and stress are commonplace. In a changing environment, good mental health is an increasingly important asset for individuals. It supports a balanced life and creates the conditions to function as part of diverse communities. Between different sectors of life there is a possibility and even the need to make choices. That makes mental flexibility, adaptability, learning new things and the ability to make independent decisions increasingly necessary.”

The key elements of the strategy are

1. Mental health as capital
2. Mental health of children and young people
3. Mental health rights
4. Adequate and comprehensive services
5. Mental health management

What is mental health as a capital?

“Mental health is one of the most important things in a person’s life. It affects all aspects of health, well-being, relationships, learning, work and life in general. Good mental health strengthens trust, reciprocity and a sense of belonging in society.”

“From an individual perspective, maintaining strong mental health involves mental health knowledge and skills. Mental health literacy refers to knowledge and understanding of mental health as a resource and a health issue, the protective and risk factors for mental health, and ways to strengthen mental health. Mental health literacy includes identifying and understanding attitudes and perceptions related to mental health.”

“Mental health skills are emotional, awareness and interpersonal skills, the resilience to cope with life crises, the ability to regulate stress and strain and to form meaningful relationships with other people. They also include the ability to control and regulate impulses that could lead to harmful substance use or other forms of harmful life-dominating behaviour. Mental health skills also include skills for everyday living, recognizing the psychological resources in oneself and others and using them to build a balance between work, study, rest and leisure. Talking about mental health and its deterioration is part of mental health skills, as is the ability to assess when one’s own resources are not enough and when professional help is needed.”

Through the measures identified in the strategy, these results can be achieved, for example, through objectives closely linked to life planning exercises such as Self-Hack.

– “Increasing mental health knowledge and skills in early childhood education and care, schools, and educational institutions, both through projects and curriculum development. (Mental Health Capital)

– Increasing mental health knowledge and skills through training and projects in the workplace, at points of change in working life and in management. The well-being of staff at work is the most important asset of organisations, and mental health is a key part of this. Improving ways of identifying stress and fatigue among staff. Prepare a programme of measures for good mental health and working life. (Mental health capital)

– Strengthening the development of mental health skills and good self-esteem in adolescents by raising awareness of the good practice, investing in training in mental health skills and influencing the culture in early childhood, primary and secondary education. (Child and adolescent mental health)

The implementation of this policy requires a systematic use of skills, management and inter-agency cooperation. In sport-terms: the whole team – from the people in the communities in the third sector to those involved in medical specialist care – must be brought together to work in the same direction (Appropriate and comprehensive services).”

Sources:

Sami Pirkola’s summary of the topic (FIN) https://stm.fi/documents/1271139/12804033/SamiPirkola_mielenterveysstrategia_11.2.2020.pdf/afe8528b-7e22-fe90-6334-c04a8fd00453/SamiPirkola_mielenterveysstrategia_11.2.2020.pdf?t=1583244275000 

A wider publication by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. (FIN)
https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/162053/STM_2020_6.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y

Interview with Sami Pirkola, Professor of Social Psychiatry

In preparing the strategy, Sami has highlighted service system studies that describe members of his profession, such as clinical psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists, as part of a mental health service package. This way of thinking recognises that mental health itself is not just a service provided by a trained professional, but a complex whole, influenced by multiple actors in an individual’s life. A simple example is a collaboration between clinical professionals and, for example, student counsellors in relation to a student. One of the most recent priorities Sami identifies is the attachment of communities to people’s lives, for example as part of mental health rehabilitation. In this case, clinical therapy itself does not only fill gaps in mental health but as part of a service, the package helps the individual towards a meaningful life, which is often achieved through communities, for example.

As one example of a new kind of community, Sami recently participated in a group called Hundred Days of Autumn, which used the internet to share and constructively comment on nature photos taken by its members each autumn day. The online community inspired and invigorated the group members and led to many life changes, such as a deepening hobby and even a marriage between the group members after the autumn days had already ended. Sami is also considering how communities like this could be better embedded in mental health services or, more directly, in people’s lives. From Sami’s point of view, there is a great need for social innovation in society today, as community-based care solutions, at least for mental health professionals, are relatively undeveloped, although their potential has already been proven.

With this interest in the topic, Sami took a preliminary look at the Self-Hack career workbook and gave feedback from his own psychiatric perspective. The My Life Story-Map exercise stood out clearly, showing the course of one’s life up to this point through different aspects of life. Narrative creation and storytelling have been identified as effective tools in mental health treatment. Sami also provided constructive feedback, particularly on the presentation of the individual exercises. From a clinical perspective, it is important that the researched data on the purpose and effectiveness of the exercise is revealed. In general, he said that the book is credible, for example, because of references from Stanford University.

Sami sees problems of credibility in social mental health discussions. With self-help books being popular and treatment methods based on different beliefs fighting against the academic thinking he represents. In psychiatry, often over a hundred years of experience, research and scientific reporting have gone into developing a treatment. At the same time, many assumptions have been disproved by evidence. Some practitioners, for one reason or another, ignore the research and publish their treatment guidelines without any guarantee that they will work. If anything positive is to be taken from this, Sami says they may inspire someone to pay attention to their mental health conditions, in the hope that harmful practices will be corrected, like harmful gym instruction.

This is a big challenge for the success of Finland’s mental health strategy. How to bring together clinical mental health professionals, mental health educators and trainers, and those involved in mental health such as education, workplaces and communities so that the issue can be discussed in a common language. For example, Sami would like his colleagues to drop some medical jargon and use a language that is easier to follow by everybody. To support the discussion, it would be great to have a metric for developing social value, as social innovation and multi-stakeholder participation in mental health initiatives make it very important to be able to see how new approaches are working.

Summing up the interview, Sami mentions that improving mental health is a complex process. Good mental health is linked to a balanced and enjoyable life. It is therefore contradictory to ‘cure’ a person without trying to create change in their life, with its potential problems. Therefore, mental health work is fundamentally about finding, enabling and strengthening a good and satisfying life for each individual.

The post A Strong Healthy Mind appeared first on Self-Hack.

Self-Hack facilitator and programme leader Riika-Stiina Laurokar has a background in social sciences, from which she holds a Master’s degree. She studied at the University of Tampere, three different universities in Asia and, taking advantage of the freedom of distance learning, Riika-Stiina travelled to several countries and spent most of her study years abroad. Prior to her self-coaching role at the City of Tampere, she worked as a coach in two private career coaching companies and as a business coordinator at the City of Tampere.

In her work as a career coach, Riika-Stiina responds to clients’ inquiries about unemployment benefits and support for their employment. Sometimes the best solution is to start studying or starting a business. Related to the development of the work Riika-Stiina is part of projects in cooperation with different departments of the City of Tampere and Tampere University of Applied Sciences. Every season, Riika-Stiina provides full-time orientation for new employees in employment services.

She finds her work natural because, in addition to career coaching, Riika-Stiina’s strength is making difficult bureaucratic tasks clear. She has received a lot of praise from her clients for this.

Self-Hack

Riika-Stiina was introduced to Self-Hack after her supervisor suggested that she would take over the project. As the programme involved working with job seekers with high education, Riika-Stiina decided to look into it. After meeting the developers of Self-Hack, Vesa-Matti Ruottinen and Anna Pilchi, Riika-Stiina got really excited about the topic and decided to take the project on.

“A bit of a coincidence, but it was a lucky coincidence”

Self-Hack brings an immersive dimension to Riika-Stiina’s work. Self-Hack allows her to step out of her role as an instructor and switch to facilitation, where she doesn’t need to know the right answers for job seekers. In this case, participants think and act more proactively. Riika-Stiina focuses on creating a safe situation and helps participants to continue the discussion. In this role, Riika-Stiina also learns a lot about her clients, which helps her to target the right services for them outside Self-Hack.

From the clients’ perspective, getting peer support is one of the best things about Self-Hack. Clients feel empowered when they realise that they are not struggling with their problems alone and that they can help others. For Riika-Stiina, the best moments are hearing clients thank each other. Organising a Self-Hack gives her a change from her other work, where she learns a lot about her clients and the nature of her job. Organising the course also gives her a lot of good energy and a good vibe, especially when the clients like it too.

As a tip for facilitators, Riika-Stiina recommends booking enough time in advance in the calendar. This is why she does not schedule them for the worst peak times of mid-summer and -winter. There should be at least two facilitators, preferably three because of possible illness, and it is more comfortable to work together while knowledge is exchanged and learning accumulates within the group.

Facilitators should do the tasks themselves to understand the ideas they will trigger in the participants. This makes it easier to stimulate discussion and understand what ideas participants are willing to share.

In the future, Riika-Stiina hopes to see more Self-Hack and other life-design methods in workplaces, so that employers can better understand what employees are looking for in their jobs and careers. Riika-Stiina has found Self-Hack to be very useful because through its exercises she has seen opportunities in the future that motivate her to perform at her best in her day job.

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First, a few quotes from Lauri’s previous blogs that set the stage for our conversation:

“As a result of the new wave of machine learning, Finland is faced with perhaps the most radical transformation of work in human history. It is estimated that 9% or even 47% of current occupations will be eliminated due to automation and machine learning technology. To keep up with the global competition, we need a bold investment in new learning, employment and innovation policies. In the face of accelerating global change, our approach to work and learning needs to be updated.”

https://ajattelunammattilainen.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/palikkamallista_aaltomalliin.pdf

“But the problem (in working life) is that if you don’t develop the learning and competence side, before long you can be productive in the wrong things. It is essential to outline what are the key issues for the organisation that need to be developed and then enable that development.”

“To create space, time, and freedom for people to develop their own skills and develop new ones in a self-directed and intrinsically motivated way (in addition to productive work). Let us create opportunities.”

https://www.johdonagendalla.fi/post/lauri-jarvilehto-jatkuva-oppiminen-on-2020-luvun-yhteinen-haaste

Based on these statements, we started the discussion by asking whether freedom is a necessary part of creating motivation, which then leads to learning and creativity?

Freedom is one factor in motivation, which consists of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

 Extrinsic motivation comes from doing something to achieve things separate from the act, such as reading a book to progress in university studies. Intrinsic motivation drives one to read a book for its own sake.

 In exploring intrinsic motivation, I use the self-determination theory, where the factors, in addition to freedom, are a sense of achievement and competence from the work done, and a sense of community, through which we feel the work done is valued and affects other people.

The motivational factors can interact, for example, by increasing freedom, playfulness and experimentation increase, leading to learning new things and developing competencies and abilities. On the other hand, if the employee is given clear guidance, this can also lead to the full use of one’s abilities and a state of flow. At best, a good flow leads to success, responsibility, accountability, freedom and confidence, and enables learning new things.

Today, the media is talking about the well-being of both students and employees. Do you think that more freedom in defining your work and studies is an important element of resilience? Where is more freedom needed?

More freedom to reflect on one’s own life and interests is needed in schools. In Finland, there is perhaps a generalised perception that students and workers are seen in the same light as top athletes and their performance-oriented counterparts. These top performers have multiple degrees, and responsibilities, speak many languages and climb high in the world of work. This is a badly misconceived notion, especially when applied to all situations in life. Even top performers typically seek out freely their own topics interests and generally pursue a wide range of sports before finding the one they are most passionate about. Take ice hockey player Teemu Selänne, for example, who played three different sports as a youngster before choosing to focus on hockey.

A similar story can be found with Roger Federer, and even people like Charles Darwin and Vincent Van Gogh, who tried several career paths in their lives “failing” before manifesting their own particular talents. More in a book Range, by David Epstein.

But a top performer is just one type of person among many, and these high achievers are very aware of what they want to invest in. But society cannot be built on the basis of all the people building their lives on excellence, and certainly not on the basis of everyone knowing what they want to be excellent about already in high school. All people, regardless of their professional ambition, have a role to play in society and should have the opportunity to get along in education. The solution to the problem is to find the right relationship between motivation, life situation and type of person.

Finland could put more emphasis on measuring individual learning progress rather than comparing people with their peers. In this way, performance-oriented people do not “stream roll” others in assessments, but everyone can compete against themselves. This is the case in Montessori education, where children also have more freedom to explore different topics, find their own interests and deepen their knowledge of those. Lauri’s own children are in a Montessori school. The trend towards this model is already in the new basic education curriculum, but there is a long way to go as traditions live on and teacher training changes more slowly than the curriculum.

Enduring the life of students and also those in the world of work require motivation. The biggest problem comes in situations where a person is expected or expects themselves to perform at their best when motivation is lacking. So it is important to understand when to keep the mind in an exploratory and experimental mode, settling for basic performance and, once a meaningful goal is found, switching to stronger performance. Society should support this varying motivation to perform. I wrote an article about it, in which I proposed the career wave model (FIN) as a solution. Having found inspiration, a person can pursue a career at any stage of life and society should provide a clear path to develop competencies to the required level. In this way, motivation and education meet and learning is effective. The missing competencies required may also be relatively small and thus acquiring a full degree is not meaningful, but rather course-based learning solutions are preferable.

How do you think students in Finland are taught to find their own motivation and thus plan their studies and careers?

We do not have a national structured system for this and therefore projects, courses and exercises are left to individual teachers and other actors. Study guidance is the closest equivalent, but the time spent on it is small compared to the time spent on subject studies, and even that time is largely spent on developing technical study skills. 

At Aalto University, we have Esa Saarinen to spark ideas through philosophy (FIN), we have a Good Life Engine course running and I run the Thinking Tools course myself. When we set up the company Philosophy Academy, we ran courses like this at the University of Helsinki and Aalto. At Aalto, we are in a good position because here personal impact and its development are part of our strategy, but there is still a lot to do. There are many good frameworks for action but they are not yet systematically used in our society.

What is the price tag for Finland if people study without intrinsic motivation?

I cannot calculate such a price tag. You could always say that half of the time put into learning is lost if you are not interested in the subject. We are doing relatively well in Finland, but I hope that we will not be under the illusion that we do not need to develop anything further. I think we should invest even more in building people’s personal education and career paths and helping people to find their inner motivation. We have an opportunity to show the whole world leadership in this area.

The post Lauri Järvilehto, on motivation and learning appeared first on Self-Hack.

Self-Hack came to Oulu University through a teaching development project and a lucky coincidence. Nina had worked on two projects focusing on developing students’ entrepreneurial skills (YYTO&YTYÄ). The startup entrepreneurship boom in Finland had really taken off after the 2015 SLUSH conference and the world record-breaking Finnish game companies. The boom had brought entrepreneurship support to the university world, and projects had been created in response. In addition to supporting the creation of growth companies, entrepreneurial skills were themselves recognised as important civic skills. Entrepreneurial skills were perceived as a response to the fourth industrial revolution, the perceived transformation of working life. It requires workers to be flexible in finding and creating work roles/identities for themselves as traditional job descriptions and career paths disappear.

Against this background, the University of Oulu had already organised business counselling and accelerator programmes. New students already had a common event at the beginning of their studies, where faculties shared problems for students to solve in teams. The purpose of this event was to encourage students to think independently and to create a team spirit among students. However, the Future Factory event was found to be more appropriate for a later stage of studies, when students’ subject knowledge and confidence in solving complex problems is more developed, rather than an orientation week. Entrepreneurship services, on the other hand, were only targeted at a small proportion of students who had grown into an entrepreneurial identity. Comprehensive entrepreneurship education was not an option. The problem was to get activities at the very beginning of the students’ entrepreneurial pathway that would activate them to think about their own studies and careers independently and thus practise the basics of entrepreneurial skills.

In 2019, Niina, who recently graduated with a Master’s degree in Education, was employed by the YYTO project and discovered the Self-Hack weekend event organised by the Oulu Entrepreneurship Society together with Creativity Squads. She attended the event because she felt it would be useful for a friend she had brought along. However, Niina was more enthusiastic about the event herself because she saw it as addressing many of the problems her fellow students were facing. Education did not guarantee secure jobs and it was anxiety-provoking for students to think about graduating, not knowing what would happen afterwards. Self-Hack provided the tools to work through the future in an encouraging and safe environment.

Self-Hack

Niina shared her experience of Self-Hack with Nina and after they both got excited about the idea, they started to take it forward at university. The aim was to create a Self-Hack as a common experience for new students at the start of their studies. So far, Self-Hack had been organised on weekends as two or three-day events. In Oulu, to facilitate the organisation of the Self-Hack, they wanted to shorten it to a one-day event, and in cooperation with Creativity Squads, a five-hour life-design hackathon was created

The planning and organisation of the event required a lot of work, not only in terms of organisation but also in terms of internal sales within the university. Niina stressed the importance of open communication and a proactive attitude in running the Self-Hack. In this way, questions from various university staff about the major project were answered. For many, it was enough to discuss and present the project with them, after which they were able to state that they felt it was working. This created a sense of ownership of the event. Self-Hack was organised separately for the education curricula planners, whom many turned to the advocates for the event. It was also good to link the Self-Hack to existing career guidance and study services, thus creating coherence within the university.

Here you can read about how Self-Hack is organised in universities like Oulu. https://www.oulu.fi/fi/self-hack

After a lively event in autumn 2019, the organising team got together to spend the evening and read student feedback on the event. They were surprised to find that the feedback was repeatedly very positive. It was clear from the feedback and from the discussions afterwards that the students really appreciated the event, which helped them to open up conversations with each other on in-depth topics and to spark new perspectives on the whole of their studies.

A dedicated course on facilitation was also created for Self-Hack facilitators, with the possibility to gain 5 study credits. Nina summarises a few tips for facilitators:

• It goes without saying that familiarising yourself with the material beforehand makes facilitation much easier. In addition to familiarising oneself with the material, one can ask colleagues or the authors of the material why an exercise works the way it does. It is not a good idea to start facilitating an exercise if you do not sign off on it yourself.
• The atmosphere should be kept light, the primary aim is not to complete the tasks but to generate good discussion.
• There is no one right way to do Self-Hack. Some groups are very talkative and insights seem to come from many sources, while some participants have many insights on paper and in their own minds, but prefer to keep them as insights. Either way is right.

In the autumn of 2020, the Covid pandemic forced the Self-Hack to be held remotely. The event was again successful, but different. In this case, the same kind of communal spirit between the students could not be established, which was unfortunate, but the Self-Hack self-reflection exercises played a more important role and the students got a lot out of them. The feedback received through the Covid-Autumn highlighted the challenges of time management and self-management that distance learning presented to students. Based on the feedback, Niina edited a special edition of the Self-Hack workbook focusing on the student’s everyday life. This version of Self-Hack was done by new students in autumn 2021, while universities were still closed.

The development of Self-Hack will continue in Oulu as Niina is responsible for developing the first-year experience for university students. After the project ended, Nina continued as an expert on collaboration between researchers and started her PhD studies in art education.

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Nelli had already heard about Self-Hack while working in the employment services of the City of Tampere. She facilitated job-search groups where job-seekers toured together in relevant places in Tampere, learning job-search skills at the same time. One of these places was the Tribe Tampere association’s co-working space P47, where the community manager of the space and one of the founders of Self-Hack, Vesa-Matti Ruottinen, introduced the space and his own career to the group. The presentation was very inspiring and instructive on the career. After it, Nelli [EK1] and her colleagues asked more questions about Self-Hack, which had been one of the elements of the presentation. The conversation led them to ask their supervisor if the Self-Hack as a group coaching method could be piloted in the city of Tampere and she said yes. Nelli gives a lot of credit to her supervisor Annika Peltomaa, whose developmental spirit made a quick pilot possible.

After Nelli was moved to a new job in career guidance at TAMK, Self-Hack was already in the organisation’s pipeline and she joined the executive team with Minna and Elli. Minna had the project in hand from the TAMK side and Elli, who is finishing her Master’s degree in Education and had started working as an expert in the student union Tamko, supported the project. They describe the project as challenging but also inspiring. Organisational advice came from Oulu, where Niina Marostenmäki and Nina Jackson had already organised one Self-Hack for over a thousand students a year earlier. The Self-Hack received support from a funded project Continuous Learning, which helped enhance the experience of the event for the students and facilitators. For example, the team organised an after-party for all the organisers and facilitators.

Minna describes her work at TAMK as a career services planner. In her work, it is important to understand the whole arc of student career guidance, where employment is at the tip of the iceberg. For them, Self-Hack is a good nudge towards the world of career planning so that one’s own career is already on one’s mind in one way or another at the beginning of studies, not only after they have finished. Self-Hack also increases students’ self-esteem, which is a strong foundation for motivating their studies and for maintaining their own well-being. Higher education requires self-initiative in building one’s own future, and TAMK in particular wants to develop this culture.

Elli sees two specific strengths in Self-Hack: peer guidance and attachment to the university community, which she wants to develop further by bringing the tutors into the programme. The idea is that being a tutor will include facilitating Self-Hack for new students and especially for their own tutoring groups[EK3], students can practice life planning together. This would solve the problem of recruiting facilitators for a life planning day for over a thousand students. Peer support comes naturally from tutors, they know how to tell about the university world as they have just experienced it themselves and guide new people into it. Self-Hack serves as a tool for attachment to higher education in a human way by providing an opportunity to get to know your peer group and share deep views on life, studies, and career.

Tips for organising a Self-Hack at TAMK:

Self-Hack is an organic process in our university, developing constantly. The first implementation was the most spectacular of all with the physical implementation, student badges, balloons, after party, and the initial learning. In the winter of 2021, the team organised Self-Hacks for over 100 students remotely with six instructors. Overall, the Self-Hack days have been very rewarding, both for participants and facilitators. The new facilitators tend to be nervous about their own skills at the beginning of the day, but are excited about their own performance at the end of the day. Students already know to “trust the process” of facilitation instructions.

Communication has been the main tool for success in the organisation of Self-Hacks. Both  with the colleagues in university who may wonder about the new programme and with the new students who are in the middle of a busy orientation week. Self-Hack, while often inspiring, is not always suitable for everybody in all situations, which is why at TAMK it is okay if a student wants to leave the exercise unfinished. TAMK also has university social workers on standby in case an exercise stirs up strong emotions, which is not often the case. Self-Hack is therefore experienced individually by each person. The feedback has also shown that the participants experience the workshop in different ways. One participant wants more time for discussion, while another would like to reflect more and squeeze that time from the discussions.

The experience gained after the first implementation has helped the team to learn how to apply and further develop Self-Hack. So far, it has already been implemented three times in the autumn and spring semesters. The future of life planning is therefore a daily reality at TAMK, where its advantages in terms of career and study guidance are recognised. Now Self-Hack addresses the growing concern about Covid-pandemics’ impact on students’ well-being. Elli, Minna and Neli hope that life planning will be a regular feature for students as their studies progress. For example, Self-Hack Career Playbook exercises could be used with students in the final stages of their studies.

Your favourite Self-Hack exercise

Nelli – alternative lives

Elli – Alternative Lives, but if you have to choose another one, My Values, I have also used it to support my team in board work

Minna – Wheel of Life, even if I would do it multiple times there is always a new angle to my life

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