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 3^rd and 4^th, 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 16^th 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.