Digital Consultation with the Victorias City Youth on Mental Health

WRITER AND ANALYSTS FOR THIS REPORT:

Myron Darrel Montefalcon (National University); Mideth Abisado (National University); Jay Rhald Padilla (National University); Ramon Rodriguez (National University)   

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In partnership with Makati Business Club and The Asia Foundation, Victorias City conducted an online consultation with its youth constituents to understand how to best support the youth through more holistic and inclusive mental health care support. The digital consultation lasted from September 20 until October 5, 2022, wherein a total of 405 voters ages 15-30 years old in Victorias City participated.

After the data collection process, the survey data collected has undergone a data-science and Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to analyze and gain insights from the data. In the analysis of the vote, the most voted cause of stress of the participants is friends, family, and romantic relationships. Apart from the mentioned main stressors, other sources of stress were mined from the most frequent words in the participants’ comments: social media, appearance, public speaking, bullying, finances, and academics/schoolwork.

To further understand the participants’ comments on the open-ended question that aims to know the other source of stress. Thematic analysis has been conducted using the Gibbs Sampling Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture (GDSMM) to identify the underlying themes based on the participant’s comments. In this analysis, (4) central themes were obtained:

• Family problems
• The impact of social media
• The Uncertainty of tomorrow
• Typical daily struggles

Also, based on the analysis, the participants are more likely to tell a friend or family rather than consult a mental health professional when experiencing a mental health issue. Additionally, the participants are more likely to speak to someone if they see people experiencing mental health issues than when they experience it themselves. The most voted intervention/program in terms of mental intervention is an awareness campaign, followed by therapies and counseling.

The following are the recordings of the Citizen Assemblies:

[September 20, 2022] Strengthening Mental Health Policy through Digital Democracy in Victorias, Negros Occidental: Opening Assembly

Read and download the report below:

To know more about the Digital Democracy Project, please visit: https://mbc.com.ph/digital-democracy/

Author: Cloudcity Admin