The Importance Of Resilience In Mental Health

Resilience is known as bouncing back from the adversities and bringing in strength to cope to difficulties. Adversities happen at personal, community and organisational level. Resilience allows the person to come out of the adversity, rather than staying with it and to move forward further. This is a way of maintaining positive mental health and maintaining one’s own well being in the midst of adverse conditions. It enables a person to maintain positive health in the midst of challenges (Mowbray, 2011). It is the way of mobilising one’s own personal and community resources in a way to prevent, control or tolerate the adversity and be enhanced by it. It allows for a good performance in the presence of debilitating factors and risks and exploits

Certain risk factors to resilience are attitudinal factors, community factors, familial factors and stress. Attitude is governed by thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Locus of control of self, tolerance of events, sense of self esteem and self efficacy in achieving one’s goal play a decisive role in enhancing resilience (Mowbray, 2011). Dysfunctional families, abuse, violence, parental loss, substance abuse, truancy, suspension from school, poor academic performance, poor coping and deviant peers are some of the risk factors (ENCARE, 2007). There are certain protective factors for resilience, which includes role models in life, experiences like challenges that create resilience, a positive attitude in taking it up, interaction with others positively to live the challenges, ability to engage with others and ability to form committed relationships (Mowbray, 2011). Presence of a clean adult who is out of habits, affection and love, positive caring, parental self efficacy, hobby, community involvement, religion and reasonable community protection are protective factors for development and maintenance of resilience (ENCARE, 2007). There are positive outcomes that happen with the development of resilience, by overcoming of risk factors and enhancement of protective factors. The outcomes help in the transition from a stage of adversity to a stage of accomplishment. These positive outcomes are also the ones that measure the efficiency of the individual and community protective factors in creating resilience. Certain positive outcomes are planning of the life ahead with the knowledge of difficulty, reflection of positive outcome in the self esteem, improved confidence, self efficacy, a sense of direction, social problem solving skills, locus of control with self and awareness of choices (ENCARE,