CHAMPIONS — Local health officials have launched new community resources for self-care and mental health.
The Champaign-Urbana Public Health District has partnered with the online platform CredibleMind to offer free wellness resources accessible at c-uphd.crediblemind.com.
All Champaign County residents will have access, said JR Rill, the health district’s regional health planning manager.
“This is a way for me to personally track my mental health over time,” he said.
According to health district officials, CredibleMind offers more than 10,000 “evidence-based, scientifically supported resources aimed at promoting health without the need for medical intervention,” including reviews, articles, and community resources. doing.
Rill said users can do a “mental health check-in” to get information on how they can deal with various issues they are facing. Depending on the severity of a person’s symptoms, the site may recommend consulting a mental health professional, he added.
“We hope that people will be able to investigate this and use this as a guide in their personal mental health journey to alleviate the crisis,” he said. “That’s the important thing. And of course, if you’re in a crisis, there are resources on this site that anyone can use.”
All information shared by users is confidential, Lill said. This is not considered public health information that is shared between agencies or provided separately.
He added that any reports from the health district based on CredibleMind data would be “generalized population-level reporting.”
For example, he said, health districts could discover that a large portion of the community is seeking resources for depression and loneliness and incorporate this into policies that provide support.
“So this is used in two ways,” Lil said. “This is used as a way to support people who are facing crisis and hardship, preferably before the crisis, and also to help public health respond to this mental health crisis that we have as a whole and especially as a world.” It is also used to guide responses on the community.”
Discussing the origins of the partnership, Lill said the National Association of County and City Health Officials provided grants for local health departments to use CredibleMind as part of the organization’s Behavioral Health 360 partnership with the platform. said.
Mr. Lill estimates that it costs about $8,000 a year to access the site. The grant will fund her two-year partnership with the community and her CredibleMind, a 50-50 split with the health district covering the other half of the cost.
“We’re piloting this and using a two-year period to figure out if this is a reasonable tool for our community and if it’s something people are interested in. “We want to see if it’s beneficial,” he said. “If that happens, we would like to bring in other community partners and continue this within the community.”
