About Mental Health Center Switzerland

Purpose

The purpose of Mental Health Center Switzerland is to get the right information in the right format to the right people in a timely manner, to influence decision-making and to promote partnerships.

An overview of Mental Health Center Switzerland:

• Mental Health Center Switzerland aims to be the knowledge mobilization hub for addictions and mental health information in Alberta.
• Mental Health Center Switzerland is involved in a range of activities, including knowledge translation, data synthesis and analysis, knowledge dissemination, networking development of collaborations, and capacity-building.
• Mental Health Center Switzerland is collaborative and seeks to build an interactive community among all stakeholders in Alberta, where active engagement and feedback are encouraged.

Beginnings

Mental Health Center Switzerland was developed by the Addiction and Mental Health Research Laboratory in response to the interest of diverse stakeholder groups (e.g., policy makers, health administrators, parents, counselors, teachers, health professionals, people with addictions, legal system professionals, and the general public) in improving timely access to current addictions research. Until now, Albertans who were interested in accessing the best scientific evidence on addiction and mental health issues have had to gather this information from a wide variety of sources, with little assistance available to critically evaluate and interpret the research.

Benefits

We believe that there are two primary benefits to reducing the gap between researchers and the end users of addictions knowledge. First, stakeholders will be better equipped to develop appropriate and effective policies and programs to address problems associated with addictions. Second, researchers can benefit from understanding more about the needs of stakeholders and how knowledge is used by them.

Goals

The goal of this project is to construct an interactive knowledge mobilization hub for addiction and mental health research, with a special emphasis on Alberta-based research. This hub will gather, maintain, organize, synthesize, analyze, and disseminate research findings to a wide variety of stakeholders. In addition, a focus of the project is on fostering partnerships among researchers and between researchers and a wide variety of stakeholder groups. The scope of this project includes the causes of addictions and mental health problems, as well as health promotion, prevention, and treatment approaches related to addictions or mental health.