Earlier this year an article titled “Interactions between youth and mental health professionals: The Youth Aware of Mental health (YAM) program experience” was published in Plos One, a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal.
As YAM Instructors this article might help you make sense of some of your experiences when engaging with youth in the classrooms. As prospective YAM Instructors this paper can help you become acquainted with the YAM approach to youth. For everyone else, whether you are conducting similar programs in your communities or work with youth in other capacities, we hope that this paper contributes to the discussion of how we can work to actively involve youth in our work, in the design of mental health interventions, and how to create an inclusive atmosphere and engage with topics that appeal to youth with diverse experiences of mental health.
The paper is based on qualitative interviews with youth who participated in YAM in Estonia, Italy, Romania, and Spain. Like any mental health promotion, YAM appeals to some more than others in its intended audience and individuals engage with the program in many different ways. In this paper, Camilla Wasserman and Vita Postuvan with co-authors set out to learn more about their experiences.
In the interviews, the researchers found wide-ranging levels of motivation, ease in speaking with mental health professionals, and comfort with the format and content of YAM . The youth were clustered in five different groups relating to their positioning vis-à-vis the researcher and YAM. The following evocative labels were used: “interested”, “foot in the door”, “respect for authority”, “careful”, and “not my topic”. We also observed that the researchers brought their own expectations and employed a variety of approaches that led to anticipating answers, stating the obvious, or getting along better with some of the youth. These modes of interaction were categorized under: “favoritism”, “familiarity”, “frustration”, “out of sync”, and “insecurity”. Similar power dynamics likely transpire in other encounters between youth and mental health professionals.
As mental health professionals, we need to be aware of the professional habits and biases that can hinder us in understanding the experiences of youth. By initiating dialogue and listening closely to youth we can find a way to those experiences. Some youth are more interested or feel more at ease in speaking openly with adults, while others find such exchanges less appealing or almost intolerable. Qualitative research can help bring the underlying interplay between professionals and youth to the surface and mental health promotion programs like YAM can help to orient the conversation towards topics that matter to youth.
You can find the article by clicking here or by copying and pasting the following into your browser: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191843