Title: Emotional component
Course: Health Education, Advocacy and Community Mobilisation Part 1 - Ethiopia (Full)

Emotional component

When you are implementing a health extension programme you may encounter various feelings or emotions in households in your community such as happiness, anger or sadness. People might cry or laugh. The emotional component of health is the ability and skill of expressing emotions in an 'appropriate' way. Appropriate means that the type of response should be able to match the problem.

Think about how you might react to such feelings if you came across them while you are working as a Health Extension Practitioner. What do you think of such feelings?

Suppose a secondary school student in your area, while sitting for an exam, started to cry uncontrollably? This could be due to their inability to control themselves in the stressful situation. Or could this suggest that they have a deeper emotional health problem?

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Showing emotions like this is not something that you can immediately say, 'oh this is exam nerves'. Knowing more about someone's life is important. If you knew this student usually sailed through exams and was a calm, unflappable person, then you might begin to think this was something needing investigation. Or perhaps family circumstances are relevant here — maybe a beloved grandmother has just died.

In the previous section you have learned something about the physical and mental components of health. Social health is also an important component of overall health and in the next section you will consider the definition and some examples of social health.