Health Communication Weekly | 9.14.24

Communication Priorities: Suicide and Recovery

September is National Suicide Prevention Month and National Recovery Month, among other things. DYK: Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. There’s one suicide death every 11 minutes in this country. We have a highly trusted and effective resource for connecting people who have a mental health or suicide crisis with the help they need (see: the FREE 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). Unfortunately, one-third of Americans don’t know that 988 exists. Help raise awareness of 988 on your channels with this digital toolkit. Also, DYK: Over 50 million U.S. adults consider themselves to be in recovery or to have recovered from a substance use and/or mental health issue. Use this Recovery Month digital toolkit to inspire hope and let people know that recovery is possible. Additionally, let’s just all do what we can in our households, workplaces, and community spaces to create a world where people aren’t worn down, discriminated against, and traumatized on a daily basis. Therapy and medications can't fix everything.

Honorable mentions: Adult obesity prevalence is above 20% in every state; health misinformation alert: mouth-taping for better sleep

Major Pushes for Collaboration Between Public Health and Healthcare

AcademyHealth and the American Public Health Association have set a research agenda for advancing public health services and systems that includes “cross-sector partnerships and engagement” as one of its seven domains (“communication and narrative” is also a domain). The recently established Common Health Coalition has also committed to establishing and codifying “formal mechanisms for strategic collaboration and communication between health care and public health agencies.”

Round-Up: Cool Messengers and Mediums in Health Communication Campaigns?

We love campaigns that use innovative strategies and tactics to engage with the public. Here are a couple that we’ve seen recently:

1. Making Every Contact Count: Add taxi drivers to the list of non-traditional messengers (with barbers and hairstylists) discussing key health topics like diabetes, smoking, and annual physical exams with their clients (passengers).
2. We’re Safety Now Haven’t We: Add electronic dance music to the list of mediums being used to share safety-related health messages with Gen Z consumers who use transportation and recreation products like e-scooters and ATVs.

Using Virtual Reality for Health Communication

We made the case (back in 2018) for using immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences for health communication, and a new randomized controlled trial (RCT) shows their promise for increasing the intention to use antibiotics responsibly. TLDR: It’s not enough to expose people to health messages in a VR environment; you need to transport them into a narrative. You have to create a scenario or story (in this case, it was a game) in which your intended audience can be an active character, make decisions, and affect outcomes for the most significant and lasting shift in behavioral intention to happen.?

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