C-U Public Health District launches free resources on mental health
Mar. 29—CHAMPAIGN — Local health officials have launched a new community resource for self-care and mental health.
The Champaign-Urbana Public Health District is partnering with online platform CredibleMind to provide free wellness resources, which can be accessed at c-uphd.crediblemind.com.
Access is available to all Champaign County residents, said J.R. Lill, the health district's community health plan manager.
"It's a way to track your mental health personally over time," he said.
According to health district officials, CredibleMind offers over 10,000 "evidence-based and scientifically backed resources which aim to enhance your well-being without requiring medical intervention," such as assessments, articles and local resources.
Lill said users can do a "mental-health check-in" and get information on how they might address different problems they're facing. Depending on the severity of a person's symptoms, the site might recommend that they consult a mental-health professional, he added.
"The hope is that people will be able to look into this and use this as a way to guide their personal mental-health journeys in order to mitigate crisis," he said. "That's the main thing. And of course, if they're in crisis, there's resources available for any sort of person on that site."
According to Lill, all of the information shared by users is confidential. It is not considered public health information, shared between agencies or individualized.
He added that any report from the health district based on CredibleMind data would be a "generalized, population-level report."
For instance, the health district might find that a major percentage of the community was seeking resources on depression or loneliness, and this could be incorporated into policies to provide support, he said.
"So it's kind of used two ways," Lill said. "It's used as a way to support people in crisis and need — before crisis, hopefully — and then also to guide public-health response to this mental-health crisis that we're having as, I think, a world, but specifically as a community."
In discussing the origins of the partnership, Lill said that the National Association of County and City Health Officials offered a grant for local health departments to use CredibleMind as part of the organization's Behavioral Health 360 partnership with the platform.
Lill estimated it costs about $8,000 per year to have access to the site. The grant helps fund the community's partnership with CredibleMind for two years and is a 50-50 match, with the health district covering the other half of the cost.
"We're running it as a pilot and we hope to use the two-year period to see if this is a reasonable tool for our community, if it's something people are interested in, if it's going to be beneficial," he said. "And if it is, we want to bring in other community partners to continue having this in the community."
