CALL FOR
PAPERS
The Social Determinants of Mental Health: From Awareness to Action
Hosted
by the
Institute on Social Exclusion
At the Adler School of
Professional Psychology
Chicago, IL
USA
June 3rd
and 4th, 2010
The
Drake Hotel, Chicago
This
conference
will be the first in the United States to convene innovative thinkers
from
diverse disciplinary and professional backgrounds to address the Social
Determinants of Mental Health (SDOMH).
Featuring
Keynote
Speaker: David Satcher, MD, PhD –The 16th
Surgeon General of
the United States, former Director of the Centers for Disease Control
and
Prevention, and former member of the World Health Organization
Commission on
the Social Determinants of Health. Currently, Dr. Satcher is the
Director of
the Satcher Health Leadership Center at the Morehouse School of
Medicine.
Plenary
Speaker: Sandro Galea, MD,
MPH,
DrPH – Professor
of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, Research Professor at
the
Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Today,
there is a
growing understanding that the social conditions in which “… we are
born, grow,
live, work and age…” (WHO 2007) profoundly impact health and
well-being.
Increasingly, that knowledge is being used to inform discourse on the
prevention and treatment of such physical illnesses as cardiovascular
and
respiratory disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. It is
also being
used to shape policy and programmatic responses to these illnesses.
However,
the social determinants frame has not been as widely or explicitly used
to
shape mental health debate, policy, and programming.
The
purpose of the Conference is:
· To increase awareness about how social conditions impact mental health;
· To develop and disseminate mental health prevention and intervention strategies that are informed by the social determinants framework;
·
To
create multidisciplinary collaborations to identify and address the
multifaceted social conditions that impact mental health; and
·
To
develop new knowledge and practice innovations.
We
invite papers that create new knowledge and/or practice innovations by
doing one
or more of the following:
·
applying
the social determinants frame to mental health;
·
bridging
disciplinary and professional perspectives on the social determinants
of mental
health;
·
illustrating
the mechanisms and pathways by which social context impacts mental
health;
·
illustrating
the relationships between “macro” (e.g., national and international
economic,
climatic, political, demographic, and social forces), “meso” (e.g.,
family,
neighborhood, and community characteristics) and “micro” (e.g.,
individual
attributes) variables and mental health; and/or
·
proposing
new or describing existing policy and programmatic mental health
interventions
that are based on the social determinants frame.
Topics
might include the impact on mental health of:
·
national
and international forces (e.g., globalization, urbanization,
industrialization,
privatization, climate change, migration);
·
legislation
and public policy (e. g., labor, immigration, environmental, housing,
trade,
land use, fiscal, monetary, education, social welfare, criminal
justice);
·
institutional
behaviors (e.g., the media, private corporations, government agencies);
·
social,
political, and economic ideologies (e.g., liberalism vs. conservatism;
private
markets vs. government intervention; personal vs. social
responsibility;
individualism vs. communitarianism);
·
macro-social
phenomena (e.g., natalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and
ablism; as
well as stratification, cohesion, and exclusion)
Papers
are invited from not only from mental health professionals, but given
the
multidimensionality of the social determinants, submissions are also
invited
from professionals in other fields such as law, public safety,
architecture,
planning, housing, transportation, environmental sciences, social work,
and
human rights; and other disciplines such as economics, sociology,
political
science, demography, criminology, and anthropology. We seek submissions
from
authors representing the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors,
as well
as those representing local, national, and international bodies. Papers
submitted by cross-disciplinary, cross-professional, cross-sectoral
teams of
authors are especially welcomed.