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Youth on Mental Health Policy

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Youth on Mental Health

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Youth on Mental Health Policy Unit

Green Chinese takeaway boxTakeaways

  • Recognize how children and youth are characterized within Canadian mental health policy.
  • Consider the implications of how children and youth are represented in policy, and how their agency and inclusion offer new interpretations.
  • Reflect on the gap that racialized youth see between how people who create mental health policy perceive youth versus how youth themselves perceive their mental health.

Three green gears working togetherComponent

This component includes five pairs of masks created by racialized, young women. Mask A answers the question: from your perspectives as a young person with experiences accessing and using mental health services, how do you see children and youth said to have mental health issues? Mask B addresses the prompt: from your perspectives as a young person with experiences accessing and using mental health services, how do you think others see children and youth said to have mental health issues?

Green kitchen weigh scaleEvaluating the Artefacts

Looking Closer
Time: 120 minutes; flexible
Format: In-Class; online

Part One: Locating and Analyzing Policy

Ask students to examine three levels of policy: international, Canadian-national, and Ontario-provincial. Students should locate the policies and identify the key messages that underlie each policy. In particular, students should investigate the following: 1) how are children and youth represented or constructed; 2) what values and beliefs do the policy statements represent; 3) what are the implications of these constructions; and finally, 4) how do they reflect dominate discourses about mental health, children/youth, and childhood?

For a shorter activity, ask students to look at one level of policy (45 minutes), and then move onto part two.

Example Policies

Part Two: Putting the Masks and Policy Together

Then as part two ask students to examine the messages represented in two sets of masks created by racialized young women involved with the mental health system. Consider how their experiences of stigma are addressed, not addressed by the policy statements. Use a definition that treats stigma as discrimination, as institutional stigma, and ask how the policy statements either write in or ignore racialized young women’s experiences.

After the letters have been written, create small groups of 3-4 people, and have learners share and discuss their letters. Learners should highlight how they understood youth as experts when writing their letters and explain what they decided to focus on.

Green hand-held magnifying glassLearning Lens

Mental health policies do not represent the lived realities of racialized peoples, youth, and adults. The artefacts for this unit demonstrate the gap between how racialized youth understand mental wellbeing, and those who create mental health policies. They also emphasized the importance of centring the voices of children and youth in creating policy that reflects their expertise, knowledge, and experiences. Collaborative policymaking, however, requires full participation of all involved, and a willingness to work with people outside of traditional positions of power. This process is not always undertaken, or fully realized.

For example, the Representative for Children and Youth (RYC) is an independent office of the legislature in British Columbia that helps provide oversight on youth welfare. Since 2013, they have collaborated with youth to put forward recommendations to foster better policies that help children and youth. One such publication, Detained: Rights of Children and Youth Under the Mental Health Act, showed the importance of including youth expertise when formulating policies that concern them. One of the key recommendations from this report was the need for culturally connected care.

Indigenous youth who were engaged with the RYC for this report shared experiences of racism and lack of culturally relevant support when detained under the B.C. Mental Health Act. Further research showed that there was no funding for culturally relevant care. In addition to the lack of supports, because forced psychiatric treatment was and continues to be about the individual, provincial mental health policy failed to address Indigenous responses to historical and contemporary traumas. Instead of addressing the current social, political, and economic conditions of Indigenous youth, the youth are held solely responsible for their wellbeing. One youth reported: “There was one way in their head to calm me down and that was medication … I don’t think distractions are a plausible approach. I feel like if we’re there, we’re trying to work through something much deeper.”

Working with youth and other stakeholders, Detained recognized the need to integrate Indigenous practices in treatment to support culturally appropriate healing, such as land-based healing programs. Expertise from the youth themselves has led to some policy changes including recommendation one: “That the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions work with the Ministry of Health and the
Ministry of Children and Family Development to conduct a review, after consulting with health authorities, First Nations, Métis Nation and urban Indigenous communities and leadership and other
appropriate bodies, into the use of involuntary mental health care for children and youth to identify the conditions that are contributing to its increased use, and identify immediate opportunities to provide voluntary interventions or improve practices that would reduce involuntary admissions.” The findings of the report recognize and put into action the importance of mobilizing youth expertise in policymaking. However, collaboration and consultation for culturally viable supports remains an imperfect process. A 2023 progress report indicated that the B.C. legislature had made no progress on any of their recommendations.