Improving Inclusion of Youth Voices in Mental Health Systems

In many health and mental health settings, there is an interest in gathering service users’ perspectives to be able to improve the treatments available and the experience of getting care. Services might ask people to give their opinion on their mental health, their wellbeing, or their experience with the service. Often, services gather these perspectives through questionnaires. In youth mental health settings, it is very important to gather young people’s perspectives to have a good understanding of how to make services better for them. However, it can be hard to get young people to fill out these questionnaires for many reasons. ​

 

This project, run by Dr. Tovah Cowan, a postdoctoral fellow in the YMHC, is bringing together together small groups of young people who all received mental health services from a particular setting in Canada or the United States of America (e.g. early intervention for psychosis services in Nova Scotia or Integrated Youth Services in Québec) to discuss how to improve this process so that young people’s voices can be integrated into the mental health service. We are sharing their recommendations back with the service so they can improve how they gather young people’s perspectives. As these small groups are running in distinct cultural and geographic settings, we are exploring for commonalities and differences in their recommendations.