A 2018 Schneck Medical Center community health needs assessment revealed the top issues to address in Jackson County.

They are substance abuse, nutrition, physical activity, mental health and tobacco use.

The assessment is the initial step in the framework of collecting data, assessing where we are as a community and letting that data drive the decisions around the programs put in place, the policies to address and the action plans going forward.

The most recent statistics on the countyhealthrankings.org/reports/state-reports/2020-indiana-report website show adult mental health is a concern. More than half of Jackson County residents (54.3%) identified mental health as a major issue within the community.

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Bethany Daugherty, health and wellness education specialist at Schneck and coordinator of the Healthy Jackson County All-Coalition, shared that information during a Healthy Jackson County Zoom meeting Nov. 4. There were 64 people who participated in the meeting.

The meeting was a community conversation about the health of Jackson County and how the coalition can address the health needs identified in the most recent needs assessment.

The coalition was formed several years ago through a grant from the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention for obesity prevention.

“Many positive changes were made in the community as a result of this grant,” Daugherty said.

When the grant project ended, she said the coalition wanted the work to continue, so in 2018, Schneck became the backbone organization for Healthy Jackson County.

“Our most recent health needs assessment identified obesity, physical inactivity and tobacco use as areas of concern for our community,” she said. “The coalition has three work groups addressing these concerns, and in addition, there is a Spanish health work group to specifically help the health and wellness needs of the Latino population of Jackson County.”

Daugherty said 3 in 10 Schneck service area adults (30.5%) have been diagnosed by a physician as having a depressive disorder. This is higher than the state and national numbers.

Statewide, the number is about 15%, and nationwide, it’s about 22%.

RaeAnn Mellencamp of REinvented health coaching service in Seymour said she believes poor nutrition and lack of exercise is a vicious cycle and has contributed to this problem.

Christopher Fogle, Decatur County extension educator and moderator for the Nutrition, Physical Activity and Weight breakout group, said repetitive motion in industry can lead to some mental health issues, too.

Fogle said identifying those areas where that repetitive process continues plays a huge factor into that.

“Also, mental health can be hard to talk about, like if someone breaks an arm, you can easily see that arm’s broken,” he said. “But to say you don’t feel well emotionally, that’s something where people can ask if a person’s faking or if it’s a real thing.”

Melanie O’Neal, executive director of Mental Health America of Jackson County, said she knows how hard it is to talk about how we feel.

“We start off talking to preschool-aged children in a program, and we have to try to teach them at a young age that it’s unhealthy to keep our thoughts and feelings in our head,” O’Neal said. “Molly Marshall at Purdue Extension has shown a film called ‘Reject’ that is evidence-based about how we learn at a young age our behaviors, our patterns and our responses to those feelings in our head.”

O’Neal said Marshall also is part of a suicide coalition under the umbrella of Mental Health America.

“This past September, we had our first suicide prevention awareness campaign promoting the suicide prevention text line/talk line,” O’Neal said. “We revised a list of mental health providers in Jackson County, and we mentioned the online mental health screenings that are available through our website.”

O’Neal said doing an online assessment survey can be the first step in helping people identify if there might be a mental health situation, and then the key is getting treatment.

“So that’s why our team felt it was very important to spend some grant dollars getting the list of those mental health providers in Jackson County and get that out into the hands of our community members. It really is all about education,” O’Neal said.

“We don’t know how to treat how we’re feeling unless we have the tools in front of us,” she said. “So we try to provide one-stop shopping for that assessment and for that referral information.”

O’Neal said the website has seen a 51% increase in people accessing online mental health screenings in the last 13 months.

This shows how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our mental health within our community, she said.

Marshall said it’s also about increasing the awareness of what’s available as to the mental health services in the county and also trying to decrease the stigma affiliated with seeking help.

“In the ideal world, it’s going to look normal for people to be out exercising all the time,” she said. “It’s also going to be normal to have a mental health provider, and that’s what we’re working toward, and there’s still more work to do.”

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Take a free and confidential mental health screening online at mentalhealthamericajc.net.

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