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S6E4: Transcript

Mental Health and Human

Flourishing

with Tom Osborn

Tavia Gilbert: Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, Tavia Gilbert, and

along with journalist Richard Sergay, every first and third Tuesday of

the month, we share conversations about the art and science of

human flourishing.

I’m tempted to say that today’s episode is a very personal one, but

that might be a bit misleading, as every Stories of Impact episode is

deeply personal. But today’s conversation is all about young people,

education, mental health, and thriving, and these are all things that

my family and I take very personally.

My parents were both teachers, and I grew up with their stories

about the thrills and the challenges of guiding, and learning from,

young people in classroom settings. And my father is currently in

the last few weeks of his run for Idaho State Superintendent of

Public Instruction, the highest office in my home state that

oversees public education.

As his deputy campaign manager, I’m considering with him what it

is that students need to thrive. Is it more teachers and smaller class

sizes? Is it better school infrastructure and more technology? Is it

more on-site nutrition and health care resources?

Again and again, what we keep coming back to are a couple key

points: Student mental health is an increasing concern of teachers,

administrators, and political leaders. In addition, thriving, mentally

healthy students measurably benefit from what we on the Stories of

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Impact Podcast have called virtues, including gratitude, the ability

and willingness of citizens to use their voice, and a sense of

purpose and connection in community.

As this week's episode will show, the role these virtues play in

mental wellbeing is not restricted by geography or cultural

boundaries. Rather, these virtues are part of a formula for student

success that may, in fact, be universal.

Allow me to introduce you to the Shamiri Institute, a world away

from the state where I was born and raised, Idaho. Today’s story

takes us to Kibera, in the urban slums of Nairobi, Kenya, where an

innovative, interdisciplinary, youth-led caregiving model is

increasing student levels of success and student mental health.

Tom Osborn: We have this very unique circumstance, which is that we have a

very youthful population.

Tavia Gilbert: Meet Tom Osborn: community mobilizer, entrepreneur and research

scientist, and Harvard psychology graduate. In his long list of

accolades and successes, he is most recently co-founder and

executive director of Shamiri, which means “thrive” in Kiswahili.

Here’s Tom, explaining the genesis of the Shamiri Institute:

Tom Osborn: So the median age across Subsaharan Africa is 19. So more than

half of the population in these countries are 19 and below, and this

is really different demographic-wise from the rest of the world. Our

education system was not equipped to handle so many young

people at the same time. So just like in my time, going through high

school, the average size of the classes more than doubled. The

college opportunities were still the same, jobs also were still the

same. So when young people in the Kenyan context, look at what is

happening, they find it very hard to be able to draw or paint a clear

path towards self-fulfillment.

Tavia Gilbert: Tom answered this need by co-founding Shamiri, a cutting-edge

educational organization that put youth mental health, meaning,

and purpose at its center. He wanted to equip his fellow young

Kenyans not just with a way to improve test scores and offer better

access to systems of knowledge they would need to succeed, but

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even more importantly, give them a sense of self, confidence,

agency, and resilience. He wanted to explore what simple

interventions could help young people as they transitioned from

adolescence into adulthood; what could give them the best chance

and opportunity to actualize life outcomes and realize their dreams.

Tom Osborn: We define human flourishing from a functioning perspective. So are

you able to function socially, can you maintain your relationships

with your family, friends, significant others, etc., from an academic

perspective, a classwork perspective, are you able to function from

that perspective?

Our work is not about labeling you as being depressed or anxious

and dealing with that, but our work is how to help you become a

better human, you know, how to help you improve your social

connectedness, your optimism, happiness, sense of purpose. At its

core, it’s about, you know, human flourishing, and trying to give you

the tools to navigate life from that approach.

Tavia Gilbert: Tom and his colleagues realized that to help young Kenyans

flourish, they had to directly address young people’s unmet mental

healthcare needs from within a culture that didn’t even yet

communicate in the language of mental health.

Tom Osborn: Mental health is stigmatized in Kenya and in many communities

around the world. In our work in Kenya, we have realized that part of

the stigma comes from people not being familiar with mental

health. Most Kenyan communities don’t have equivalents for most

of these mental health problems. So for example, in my tribal

mother tongue, there is no direct word for depression. So if you are

going to diagnose someone with depression, you are diagnosing

them with something that they don’t really know about, and can’t

really comprehend. So we think that is the first part of the problem

with stigma.

And the second part of the problem just comes from the history of

mental health in Kenya. When someone is diagnosed with a mental

health problem, they’re removed from the community, and then

they’re taken to an asylum, and then they’re locked there for a while.

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So that obviously really influenced how people think about mental

health problems. So how do we counteract stigma in Kenya? We

don’t focus on arriving at a diagnosis of depression or calling

someone depressed, but we focus on other constituent underlying

symptoms of depression. So for example, things like, you know,

trouble sleeping, lack of motivation, feeling sad.

Our project intentionally focuses on human flourishing, intentionally

focuses on a holistic definition of mental health, that not only

includes psychopathology, or you know, having depression and

anxiety, but also includes, you know, more generally, human

functioning and character strengths and, you know, positive things

like optimism and happiness and social connectedness.

One of the key things that we really try to help develop is

self-efficacy and just giving the young people we are working with

the idea that they have agency and autonomy in their life. So in

other words, the idea that they can make decisions and that their

decisions are important. That really improves their own inner

self-efficacy, and really motivates them to start taking action on

these other things that we teach them, like, you know, practicing

gratitude, growth mindset, etc.

Tavia Gilbert: How exactly is Shamiri designed to work?

Tom Osborn: Our character, our personality traits, etc, really determine a lot about

how we go about and how we really experience the world. It

determines how we respond to adversity, when we face adversity or

when we fail, how we react to success, you know, when we are

successful.

And often, especially in a low-resource context like Kenya where we

work, when we think about change, when we think about changing

life outcomes, we tend to think about it from a very infrastructure

perspective. So we tend to think about it from the perspective of

like, we need to build more schools, we need, you know, more

teachers, we need to reform, the whole curriculum, etc.

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But what we are realizing over the past few years is that actually, if

we focus on the characters and their personalities and the traits

that they have, and we try to really strengthen that, we can, without

completely changing the system or, you know, building new

schools, give people a platform to become better.

For example, we work with a school in Kibera, which is a very large

urban slum here in Kenya, and what we have realized from our work

there is, once the students participated in our programming, 70% of

the students saw a 2% increase in their grades. Which is, you know,

a big increase just from participating in a program that is focused

on character development and focused on character strengths.

And these kinds of outcomes are often similar, or sometimes even

exceed, you know, the changes in outcomes that we see when we

build new infrastructure or hire more teachers, etc. So the true

benefit of character strengths and character development,

especially in the context of young people, adolescents who are still

young and very malleable, and where there’s still a great opportunity

to intervene, is that we can, at very low cost, through very scalable

models and methods, be able to allow people to improve in

outcomes like their grades, social relationships, school climate,

etc., without the top-down, high-resource changes that we normally

do.

And so, eventually we have this great recipe to be able to

turbocharge change and to empower young people to realize their

dreams.

Young people gather in groups of 8 to 15 students, and this is

implemented as an after-school program. Between 10 to 15% of the

students will need more support. And so for those students, we

normally offer them a one-on-one engagement outside of the group

context.

We will give them exercises, so one of those exercises may include

keeping a gratitude journal where every day they write and reflect

on the things that they’re grateful for that happened to them, or it

may include asking them to write a gratitude letter to a friend or a