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Hi, all.  I'm Rebecca and I graduated from Bryn Mawr this May with a major in NBS.  I'm interested in going into the field of public health professionally, and so I've been spending a lot of time researching public health master's of public health (mph) programs.  Throughout this graduate school research project, I've noticed a trend that directly relates to LauraC's post above.

Observation: I haven't researched all of them yet, but as far as I have, only one CEPH accredited mph school* allocates an entire department, an entire curriculum, to mental health as a public health issue.  Far more schools have a department called something like "Social and Behavioral Sciences" within their public health program that integrates a study of psychology, society, and illness.  

This observation raises the following questions: 

1. Do we in this forum conceive of mental health differently than the public health community?  Public health workers differentiate their work from MDs by typically saying that doctors study individuals affected by disease and public health workers study populations affected by disease.  Does the absence of a mental health curriculum suggest that mental health is not seen as something that affects whole populations and therefore is relegated to psychologists and psychiatrists who only focus on the individual?  This seems problematic to me since this discussion on mental health aims to root it in a cultural context, which is made up of many people. 

2.  Is there value in a department that attempts to address human behavior as a composite of neurobiological states, psychological states, and cultural contexts, as the Social and Behavioral Sciences departments attempt to do?  It seems to me that if you want to understand human behavior, this approach is a really great one.  I'm just not convinced that these departments are focusing on topics that this Mental Health and the Brain course syllabus is particularly concerned with (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, etc.)....

*(If you're interested, A complete list of CEPH accredited public health schools can be found at this website: http://sophas.org/SchoolMaps.cfm)