SPEECH BY SMS DR JANIL PUTHUCHEARY AT THE LAUNCH OF REAL, THE AGENCY FOR INTEGRATED CARE'S YOUTH-CENTRIC MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT CAMPAIGN

Dr Wan Rizal, my Parliamentary colleague

Dr Jade Kua, Chairperson, Mental Health Film Festival Singapore

Dr Gerard Ee, Chairman, Agency for Integrated Care (AIC)

Mr Dinesh Vasu Dash, Chief Executive Officer, AIC

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen

Our filmmakers and youth mental health advocates

1.             I am happy to be here today to launch ‘REAL’, the new branding for Community Youth Mental Health under the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC). This rebranding celebrates the incredible work of our young filmmakers have put in for this year’s Mental Health Film Festival Singapore (MHFFS). You are using film to raise awareness of mental health.

2.             Over the past 12 years, AIC, together with its partners, has played a critical role in rolling out the Community Mental Health Masterplan. This work has helped built national awareness of mental health and enabled early intervention and care access for Singaporeans with mental health issues.

Youth Mental Health in Singapore

3.             The state of youth mental health in particular, deserves attention. The National Youth Mental Health Study conducted by the Institute of Mental Health found that one in three local youths aged 15 to 35 surveyed in the study, reported severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. These symptoms were associated with key factors such as excessive social media use, body image issues, and cyberbullying.

4.             Separately, a survey conducted by AIC and Milieu Insight this year with 1,000 youths showed that nearly half of the respondents reported burnout and anxiety symptoms.

5.             Young people may not be inclined to seek help until their symptoms become severe, they reach a crisis, something changes, and they reach a breaking point. they are at their breaking point. We need to encourage and create a supportive environment. We need to find ways for young people to seek help early and seek out the resources that they need.  

Launch of AIC’s REAL Mental Health Support Campaign

6.             So it is timely that AIC is launching the REAL campaign. This highlights AIC’s commitment beyond helping seniors, to also help young people with mental health needs. We hope the REAL campaign will empower youths to reach out for support and encourage their friends to do the same. It's something that we need to then inculcate. It's not just about pushing a message to the young people, but finding ways to engage them, empower them, get them involved in letting their colleagues, their peer networks to understand the importance of this and getting them to be advocates for this important issue.

7.             Many of our youths prefer searching for help online. A key feature of the REAL campaign is its online resource platform, realspace.sg, which tailors mental health resources to our youths for easy wayfinding to appropriate community mental health services with just a few clicks. 

AIC’s Role in Supporting Youth Mental Health

8.             Besides this campaign, AIC has established 10 CREST-Youth teams and four Youth Integrated Teams (YIT) in the community to support young people aged 12 to 25. These teams have been instrumental in detecting mental health issues in young people early and providing professional support.

9.             In the past four years, CREST-Youth and the YIT have reached out to close to 100,000 youths and parents, and provided direct support to more than 10,000 youths. By 2030, we plan to broaden the reach of these services by growing the number of CREST-Youth and YIT teams from 10 to 15 each. The National Council of Social Service is also piloting an Integrated Wellness Centre at SCAPE in Orchard, and this will offer a holistic range of mental health services for youths and their caregivers.

10.        I hope more young people with mental health issues will take steps to seek help early. I encourage all of us, not just the young one, to explore realspace.sg to find out more about these services. Understand what is the landscape of resources that's available, maybe not just for you, but for your family, for your friends, for the employees that you have, the peers that you can support. Try out the wayfinding tool. Just understand what's out there and it's never too early to seek help.

11.        The work that you do in the MHFFS, the filmmakers especially, it's a very challenging thing to do. Storytelling by itself, is already something that's challenging. Storytelling around a sensitive matter like mental health has a set of unique challenges. The issue is important. You may be inspired by a loved one, someone that you know personally, or you may be inspired by real events. You have to do justice to what has happened. You have to do justice to the issues. You cannot trivialise it. You cannot downplay it. You cannot caricature it. But at the same time, you have to engage an audience who may not understand the matter, doesn't understand the seriousness, and maybe has had no lived experience or they haven't had a personal connection. Sometimes that means surprising them, entertaining them, bringing them into the story. But you cannot, perhaps over-sensationalise the matter, over dramatise the matter, because, of course, then, if you're an advocate for mental health, you worry about what message that you're sending about the issues. To be able to do craft a narrative, to tell a story, whether in print or, in this case, in film, around a sensitive issue in a way that is educative, engaging and leaves a lasting impression that you hope young people will go out and engage with the issue, advocate for the issue, and understand at the deeper level – it requires quite a lot of careful thought and calibration. And it's that calibration that is an important lesson and an important message for all of us.

Closing

12.        In the Government, we want to do more for mental health and the well-being of Singaporeans. We want to make sure we address the mental health challenges of young people properly, and sometimes that's going to mean a careful calibration of our strategies. We are exploring actively some further things to do to improve youth access to mental health service.

13.        One of these issues that we have to carefully calibrate is parental consent. It's not so straightforward. It's not so clear exactly how we should do it. We are actively exploring the space, trying to understand how we can correctly calibrate the need for parental consent to ensure that young people have timely access to lower risk support, especially support such as counselling.

14.        We need to ensure, at the same time that parents remain involved in the recovery journey of a young person. Their support is crucial to the longer term mental health outcomes of young people. So this is something that we're exploring, and we are trying to calibrate our approach in this space very carefully.

15.        What else can all of us do as individuals, as family members – we have loved ones, colleagues at work. We can improve mental health literacy. We can have conversations. We can extend a helping hand of support to those who potentially may have mental health challenges and show that there is no stigma. We have no fear about asking “how are you” and offering some helping words and a helping hand. We can all play a part.

16.        So thank you to all for playing your part as mental health advocates, especially to the young people here today. Thank you for being champions of mental health in your own networks. Thank you for the hard work that you do reaching out to people about this. Thank you for putting together the films, your advocacy and support, make a difference. I encourage you to continue looking out for each other. At long may our efforts continue to make lives better for all of us.