Golightly Heads Norwood Mental Health Awareness Training Program

NORWOOD, MA - Mental health awareness has become an increasingly important topic, particularly after the challenges of the pandemic and with the holiday season now in full swing. Norwood is now working to train its town employees on how to be effective first points of contact for those experiencing mental health issues, thanks to a five-year grant the Board of Health recently received.

The Mental Health Awareness Training (MHAT) grant of $625,000 allocated over the course of five years was awarded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). It allowed the Health Department to hire Francesca Golightly as the program director and implement a training program for town and School Department employees to be able to recognize mental health issues, de-escalate situations and refer people to resources.

“We knew there was a mental health need in this community far before the pandemic happened,” Golightly said. “Not for any particular reason, but every community needs health support. People have personal and societal issues that they need to work through, and sometimes we don’t have enough resources to address these things.”

For the past year, Golightly had been working with Impact Norwood, a non-profit that focuses on promoting a drug-free and healthy Norwood, as an intern while pursuing her graduate degree in community assessment and program design from Boston University at night. She started her current position on Oct. 15 and noted the intersection between mental health awareness and substance abuse.

“While Impact Norwood primarily focuses on substance abuse, it also incorporates elements of mental health awareness,” she explained. She ran the youth ambassador coalition, which includes Norwood Public School students in grades 6-12.

Golightly described the different components of the five-year grant, which she said was received the first time that the Health Department applied to SAMHSA.

“The grant is designed so that town employees will be trained to implement mental health first aid,” she explained, noting that 700 employees will go through the training over five years.

“We think of so many people being certified in CPR, but we don’t think of anyone being certified in mental health first aid,” she said. “People can have a mental health crisis or a mental health concern or illness at any time. But do we run to their side when someone is having a mental health crisis like we do when they are having a heart attack? No, we don’t.”

Golightly said she wants to break down the stigma of mental health issues through the day-long training sessions in recognizing situations where a person is in mental distress.

“Our hope is that through the funding through the grant, we will train all town employees, all School Department teachers and staff, and primary care physicians in mental health first aid,” she said. All School Department trainees will be educated in recognizing issues faced by young people.

Another component will be a referral management system that will track the number of people who were served and referred to treatment resources through an anonymous numeric system.

“If we refer 100 people to treatment, we would like to see that 75 percent of them receive follow-up care,” Golightly said.

Counting the number of cases referred is a requirement of the grant so that outreach effectiveness can be tracked over the five-year period, according to Golightly.

Golightly also will create local media campaigns about mental health awareness, she added.

“Whether people need to talk to someone over a couple of days because an acute crisis has arisen,” Golightly said, "or they have something that is ongoing, we want to be able to refer people to counseling or a social worker.”

The Health Department already has connections with Norwood Behavioral Health, NAMI South Shore in Hingham and Riverside Outpatient Center in Norwood to assist those in need of services.

The third component of the grant is reducing the stigma of mental illness, Golightly said.

“We are so ingrained as a society for people not to tell other people when they feel sad or depressed or if they have anxiety,” she noted. “People need to know it’s okay to feel these things or go on medication if they need it. Mental health is a medical condition, just like diabetes.”

Eventually, she would like to see the training made “a standard practice” for the town. It could also be tailored to meet the needs of elders and people with disabilities. She called the grant "a starting point."

In each of the first four years of the grant, 25% of the employees from each sector will be trained. In the final year, school and public health nurses will be educated to train others in mental health awareness.

Golightly compared this position with her work with Impact Norwood. Too often, she said “people are put into boxes” based on other's perceptions. She advocated for the use of “people-first language.”

“We want to change the culture so that people are not referred to as drug addicts but rather people with addictions,” she explained. “We need to think about the words we are using.”

She said the same holds true with perceptions of young people.

“A lot of times, we generalize and say, ‘All young people use drugs, drink alcohol, and are up to no good,'” she said. “Our campaign with Impact Norwood was to change those social norms.”

Golightly met with up to 25 students for an hour each week during her involvement with Impact Norwood. One project showed survey data of students that showed that 98 percent of them didn’t smoke cigarettes and 78 percent of them didn’t vape.

Impact Norwood then created a public service announcement on social norms.

“We wanted to shift the framework from negative to positive, so we made a video project where the members described the things they like to do, such as being involved in the theater or pursuing art,” she said.

Another video project was an Impact Norwood public service announcement that includes community leaders discussing the importance of promoting positive youth activities and interactions.

Over the summer, students observed the impact of advertising of alcohol, vaping and cannabis on young people. They collected more than 40 pictures of ads targeting youth about these substances that used vibrant colors and images and used terms like “high energy” and “low calorie.”

“They are so much smarter than we think," Golightly said of the young people. "They are passionate about prevention and about substance use being a condition and not a person. They are so excited to be involved in something that is beyond themselves."

Impact Norwood members will present their findings to the Board of Health at a future meeting, Golightly said.

“Now they are becoming comfortable having conversations at home and saying that maybe alcohol should be kept in a cabinet that is out of their sight or could be locked,” she added.

"I think the pandemic forced us to think about the things we all sometimes neglect," Golightly continued, citing mental health and addiction. "Norwood is so lucky because it has so many people who care about learning about substance use prevention and learning about mental health, and who are trying to educate themselves and their families to do better."