Building familiar-looking bridges and reaching familiar-looking outcomes: Information behaviors of recovered mental health patients and their roles in sense-making their mental health
Article
This paper explores the motivations of recovered Filipino mental health patients (RMHPs) for seeking and processing mental health-related information, as well as these information behaviors’ roles in helping them make sense of their mental health. The findings show that practical motivators such as the need to alleviate pain and socio-psychological motivators shaped RMHPs’ information seeking, information processing, and privacy management. In particular, the pain of enduring symptoms and the expectations to get better increased their intentions to seek information, engage with their concerns more effortfully, and craft lenient privacy boundaries that helped them gain more insights about their mental health. RMHPs labeled these behaviors as guides that helped them achieve an acceptable but not ideal outcome. That is because RMHPs wish to feel “normal” again after having engaged so much with their concerns. This implies that the role of information in sense-making may be that of helping people reach familiar but not ideal outcomes.
Bridging Health: Exploring Participatory Communication among Health Communication Planners and Implementers in the Philippines
Article
This study explores a framework for theorizing the participatory media approach by examining local experiences on communication and development through the perspectives of health communication technicians, their relationships with senders and receivers in health programs and projects, and how they conduct the process of communication planning, implementation, and evaluation. The study addresses the following three main questions: (1) Who are the health communicators and what are their roles in participatory communication? (2) What is the level of participatory communication in health programs and projects? and (3) What are the approaches and characteristics of participatory communication in health programs and projects in the Philippines? The study reveals that communication technicians perceive their communication strategies as long-term processes that address the felt needs of communities with the participation of beneficiaries in planning communication that is sensitive to the culture of, beneficial to the majority of, and owned by the community.
The (Mistica) Doctor Is In: Communicating Health at Suprema dela Iglesia del Ciudad Mistica de Dios
Article
Throughout history, religion, spirituality, health, and the practice of medicine have been intertwined but are all united in seeking inproved health for all. Medical organizations and faith-based institutions consider caring for the sick as their primary mission, sometimes drawing from each other’s knowledge about healing to address patients’ concerns. This paper examines the role of spirituality and religion on the health of a populace and explains how a faith-based organization uses spirituality as the foundation for communicating health even as the community avails itself of medical science through the provision of a barangay health center.
