The road to equally well: Promoting physical health for adolescents with mental health illness

People with mental illness have higher mortality and morbidity rates than the general population. There is a raft of reasons why this occurs but includes stigma and discrimination, poorly connected health services with unclear professional role clarification and the illness itself. Adolescence is a common emergent stage for mental illness development and is therefore a target stage for health education, promotion and wellbeing into adulthood. Habits formed during adolescent are highly likely to be carried through into adulthood. The aim of this study was to explore and describe the views that adolescents hold in regard to their physical wellness. The objectives were to: assess the knowledge of adolescents receiving treatment for a mental illness on their views of physical activity and its importance into adulthood, establish the support and education adolescents might require from the multi-disciplinary team to maintain physical health into adulthood and determine any strategies that would serve an education purpose on maintaining physical health into adulthood. A qualitative study using an exploratory descriptive design has been undertaken. Convenience sampling was used to interview six adolescents who had been admitted to a mental health facility. Open coding was used to identify categories, themes and sub-themes. The categories identified from the themes were 1) Knowledge of the body 2) Exercise impact on mental state and 3) Motivation to exercise or not. The finding indicated that adolescent mental state and motivation levels have a major impact on their levels of physical activity of which they require additional support from health professionals to complete. Adolescents are knowledgeable on how physical activity can improve their mental state and wellbeing however this group had little interest in how physical activity affected their physical functioning. Though they were concerned and interested in how physical activity could affect their physical appearance.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Nursing

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Grantor

Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT)

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Loomes, Barbara

• New Zealand
• adolescents
• mental health patients
• physical activity
• motivation
• patient education
• health promotion
• interviews

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10652/6043

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:null:10652/6043