week 1 vocabs

Community Mental Health

Mental health services and approaches provided in community settings rather than relying primarily on institutional care.

Socio-Ecological Model

A framework showing that health is influenced by multiple levels: individual, interpersonal, organizational/institutional, community, and public policy.

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)

Conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect health and well-being.

Economic Stability

SDOH domain involving factors such as income, employment, and financial security.

Education Access and Quality

SDOH domain involving access to and quality of education.

Health Care Access and Quality

SDOH domain involving people’s ability to obtain appropriate, affordable, quality healthcare.

Neighborhood and Built Environment

SDOH domain involving the physical environments where people live, including housing, transportation, safety, and environmental conditions.

Social and Community Context

SDOH domain involving social relationships, community conditions, discrimination, and social inclusion.

Health Equity

The goal of ensuring everyone has a fair and just opportunity to achieve their best possible health.

Health Inequity

Unfair, avoidable, or remediable differences in health between groups.

Equality

Giving everyone the same resources, treatment, or opportunities.

Equity

Providing resources/support according to different needs and barriers so people have a fair opportunity to achieve health.

Upstream Factors

Root social, economic, institutional, environmental, and policy conditions that influence health.

Downstream Factors

More immediate individual behaviors, health conditions, healthcare experiences, and health outcomes.

Population

A group of people who are defined or counted based on shared characteristics.

Community

A group of people who have connection, shared identity, or awareness of one another.

Social Vulnerability

The degree to which individuals or communities may be more vulnerable to negative effects because of social and structural conditions.

Social Vulnerability Index (SVI)

A measure organized around factors including socioeconomic status; household composition/disability; minority status/language; and housing/transportation.

Trauma

An experience or set of circumstances that can have lasting negative effects on a person’s mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.

Individual Trauma

Trauma experienced by an individual that is physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening.

Interpersonal Trauma

Trauma occurring through harmful experiences between people, such as abuse, domestic violence, or sexual violence.

Collective/Structural Trauma

Cultural, historical, social, political, or structural trauma affecting individuals and communities, such as racism, stigma, oppression, or genocide.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

Potentially traumatic experiences during childhood, such as abuse, neglect, domestic violence, or parental mental illness/imprisonment.

Trauma-Informed Care (TIC)

An approach to care that recognizes the effects of trauma and seeks to provide care without re-traumatizing people.

Re-traumatization

When an interaction, procedure, environment, or system triggers or recreates traumatic experiences for someone.

Universal Precaution

Using trauma-informed practices with everyone, rather than assuming you will know who has experienced trauma.

4 R’s of Trauma-Informed Care

→ Realize → Recognize → Respond → Resist re-traumatization.

Toxic Stress

Chronic stress that keeps the body’s stress response activated and makes it difficult to return to homeostasis.

Homeostasis

The body’s return to a stable/normal state after a stress response subsides.

Historical Trauma

Trauma connected to historical events that can continue affecting individuals and communities across generations.

Intergenerational Trauma

Trauma whose effects can be experienced across multiple generations.

Epigenetics

The study of how experiences and stress can influence gene expression/transcription without necessarily changing the genetic code itself.

Trauma-Informed Organization

An organization that incorporates trauma-informed principles throughout its systems, structures, training, and practices, rather than relying on individual providers alone.

Recovery Model

An approach that emphasizes hope, identity, meaning, agency, self-determination, social connection, and participation, rather than defining recovery only as symptom elimination.

Recovery

A personal process involving developing a meaningful life, identity, agency, hope, and connection; not simply the elimination of symptoms.

Citizenship

Meaningful participation, inclusion, belonging, and engagement in community life.

Lived Experience

Knowledge and understanding gained through personally experiencing mental health challenges or systems.

“Nothing About Us Without Us”

The principle that people affected by mental health systems should have meaningful involvement and power in decisions concerning them.

Sanism

Prejudice, discrimination, or oppression directed toward people based on psychiatric labels or perceived mental illness.

Mad Resistance

Efforts by people with lived experience to challenge dominant mental health systems and create alternatives.

Mutual Aid

People supporting one another through shared resources, relationships, knowledge, and community support.

Intentional Peer Support (IPS)

A relationship-centered approach based on mutuality, shared learning, connection, and lived experience, rather than an expert simply treating a recipient.

Narrative Psychiatry

An approach emphasizing people’s stories, experiences, and personal meaning rather than focusing exclusively on biomedical explanations.

Agency

A person’s sense of ability, control, and power to make choices and act in their own life.

Self-Determination

The ability and right to make decisions about one’s own life and care.