Members of our human practices sub-team met with several experts within various fields of mental health to learn more about MDD and to gauge if our project held a valuable perspective on the condition. While currently the only way to evaluate risks for MDD and depression generally is through narrative interviews that diagnose individuals according to specific diagnostic criteria set out in the DSM-5, the ability to consider risks from the biological perspective is a unique potential in personalized medicine. Within the scope of our project, we also considered ultimate end-users in our research, leading us to conclude that an at-home test using fecal matter would be preferable to having a more invasive test at a healthcare facility.
Considering that our project centers around Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), we wanted to ensure that mental health and wellness learning was a priority for our team members and for our community outreach. In addition to learning about the etiology, symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of MDD, our team members looked at personal experiences of people living with the condition and how stigma and social understanding contributes to their mental health. We created educational materials to be shared over social media about this knowledge and created space within our team to discuss mental health in an open way–also called our social contact event. The idea behind this was to bring our own stories about mental health and wellness to each other, to support our team members and have impactful conversations. We consulted the McMaster Student Wellness Center previous to our event to ensure that we approached having these conversations in a sensitive and informed manner.
The research we compiled through literature searches and stakeholder interviews was used to create an educational children’s book on living with an unknown feeling bringing you down and that there is hope even in tough times–essentially bringing the topic of MDD down to the level of a child’s understanding. While we have approached knowledge translation as a topic before, hosting workshops on synthetic biology with highschool students, doing so with a more sensitive topic with even younger subjects was a challenge. We currently have plans to host a reading of the book at a local elementary school before the Giant Jamboree.
Ultimately, it is important to not only speak about the importance of mental health but to demonstrate that in practice which is exactly what our team has worked to do this year.