Pandemic and Typhoon: Positive Impacts of a Double Disaster on Mental Health of Female Students in the Philippines

Artificial intelligence in the era of planetary health: insights on its application for the climate change-mental health nexus in the Philippines

This review explores the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the light of evolving threats to planetary health, particularly the dangers posed by the climate crisis and its emerging mental health impacts, in the context of a climate-vulnerable country such as the Philippines. This paper describes the country's mental health system, outlines the chronic systemic challenges that it faces, and discusses the intensifying and widening impacts of climate change on mental health. Integrated mental healthcare must be part of the climate adaptation response, particularly for vulnerable populations. AI holds promise for mental healthcare in the Philippines, and be a tool that can potentially aid in addressing the shortage of mental health professionals, improve service accessibility, and provide direct services in climate-affected communities. However, the incorporation of AI into mental healthcare also presents significant challenges, such as potentially worsening the existing mental health inequities due to unequal access to resources and technologies, data privacy concerns, and potential AI algorithm biases. It is crucial to approach AI integration with ethical consideration and responsible implementation to harness its benefits, mitigate potential risks, and ensure inclusivity in mental healthcare delivery, especially in the era of a warming planet.

The COVID-19 pandemic's effects on mental and psychosocial health in the Philippines: A scoping review

Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remained at elevated risk for the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic because of persistent stressors to their health systems. Simultaneously facing high infection rates, strict containment measures and natural disasters, the Philippines provides important grounds for health research in LMICs. This review examined how the COVID-19 pandemic affected mental and psychosocial health in the Philippines. This scoping review included literature in English from 2020 to mid-2022 from PubMed, PsycInfo and SCOPUS, and used the PRISMA-ScR and PCC-question model. Two independent reviewers conducted blind article screening and data extraction using COVIDENCE software, followed by consensus building, data charting and analyses. This work identified 405 publications across PubMed (N = 56), PsycInfo (N = 106) and SCOPUS (N = 243), of which 76 articles addressed the Philippines. Article types included 54 research articles, 10 opinion pieces, 4 literature reviews, 6 letters to journals, 1 study protocol and 1 other report. These findings focused primarily on health professionals (N = 23) and educators/learners (N = 22) and reported mostly on moderate-to-severe clinical outcomes such as fear, depression, anxiety or stress. Coping behaviors, like resiliency and other ways of adapting to the pandemic, including religious, spiritual and community-oriented approaches highlighted experiences with stringent infection prevention and control measures to contain COVID-19 in the Philippines. The COVID-19 pandemic brought severe challenges to mental and psychosocial health in the Philippines. The literature focused mostly on healthcare workers and educators/learners, and moderate-to-severe mental health outcomes in these groups. There is a need to expand studies to other sociodemographic groups and communities across the Philippines. Future work stands to benefit from more in-depth qualitative, mixed methods, longitudinal and representative quantitative research in LMICs following this pandemic. Literature reviews remain important to synthesize post-pandemic experiences by providing context for future studies and health practice in the Philippines and other LMICs.

Dynamic Characteristics and Evolution Analysis of Information Dissemination Theme of Social Networks under Emergencies

Social media has become an essential channel for the public to create and obtain information during emergencies. As the theme of public concern for emergencies changes over time, there is a lack of research on its dynamic evolution from its latent stage. This paper selects the Henan rainstorm event as a case study and extracts the theme characteristics by combining the life cycle theory and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. It integrates the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) algorithms as the theme-coding data source to build a dynamic theme propagation model for emergencies. Our research results showed that the theme coding effectively verified the assumption of latent development trends. The dynamic theme model could reveal the theme characteristics of different time series stages of emergencies, analyze the law of the theme evolution of the network’s public opinion, and provide practical and theoretical insights for the emergency management of urban cities.

Case Series: Managing Severe Mental Illness in Disaster Situation: the Croatian Experience After 2020 Earthquake

On the 29th of December 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Petrinja in the Croatian Sisak-Moslavina County experienced a strong earthquake, resulting in a severe disruption in mental health service delivery. Specialized care community mental health teams were introduced days within the event with the aim to bridge the gap in psychiatric care that was severely disturbed in the region affected by the earthquake. Through a case series of patients with SMI, we describe how care was quickly deployed and delivered after a natural disaster and during a pandemic resulting in their functional recovery. Community mental health teams have the potential to provide feasible, comprehensive, and accessible mental health services, and their continued implementation in the post-disaster period in Croatia could be beneficial for care management of people with severe mental illness.

Digital Innovations in MSMEs during Economic Disruptions: Experiences and Challenges of Young Entrepreneurs

The spike in COVID-19 cases all over the world poses a massive impact on various sectors of society. The global economy is no exception, for it has been severely affected by the unprecedented public health crisis leading businesspeople to shutdown commercial establishments and dramatically shifting businesses into digital platforms. Immense challenges brought by the pandemic have turned into great opportunities among entrepreneurs from different parts of the globe. In pursuit of the recovery path, they considered digital tools to be instrumental to surviving the crisis and even thriving in the long term. This study explores drivers and barriers to digital innovations in micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) during economic disruptions from the perspective of Filipino young entrepreneurs. Researchers employed a qualitative method for the conduct of in-depth interviews with 46 online entrepreneurs in the Philippines and transcribed them for Inductive Content Analysis to generate themes. Results found the adverse effects of the pandemic, which reinforce entrepreneurial innovations of shifting businesses to digital platforms, categorized into intrinsic (e.g., personal and professional growth) and extrinsic (e.g., mobility restrictions, market conditions, and household economic status) motivations. Participants described the barriers to digital entrepreneurship, including skills needed for doing online business, market-related problems in digital platforms, availability of quality internet infrastructures, and the pandemic restrictions. The findings of this study contribute to the entrepreneurship literature and areas for an empirical investigation to develop programs that support entrepreneurs during economic disruptions. This would serve as a guidepost in the formulation of government policies and strategies for economic recovery through digital entrepreneurship while considering the perspectives of young entrepreneurs. This further recommends future related researches to empower entrepreneurs, particularly those in the developing economies during the pandemic and beyond.