New Research Digest: Mental health stigma among New Brunswick youth 

January 27, 2021|News
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Infographics, an effective support to knowledge mobilization in mental health!

By Carole C. Tranchant, Marina Esposito, Danielle Doucet and Ann Beaton

Since 2016, the ACCESS Open Minds research program transforms the way that mental health services are offered to 11- to 25-year old youths in many Canadian provinces and territories, including New Brunswick. This transformational project relies not only on research, to generate evidence-based data, but also on knowledge mobilization to make data accessible, understandable and, mostly, useful to knowledge users. More specifically, knowledge mobilization contributes to converge research, practice, and policies to improve mental health results for youth and families1.

As part of the knowledge mobilization strategy of ACCESS Open Minds New Brunswick, which includes diverse activities such as includes workshops and webinars, our team actively works towards sharing its research results in the form of infographics, an effective communication format that combines images, diagrams, and short texts to report a targeted content in a visual and synthetic format, easy to understand.

As an example, we are pleased to present you with our new infographic on mental health stigma, from the perspective of young New Brunswickers.

This study aimed to find out how youths from three New Brunswick communities (First Nations in an isolated region, rural francophone and urban anglophone) who resorted to mental health services perceive mental health stigma, and how they experienced it during their care and recovery journey.

The results underscore the importance of paying increased attention to the social, cultural, and institutional particularities that maintain stigma associated to mental health, or that allow its deactivation. They reinforce the necessity of listening to youth, of giving them the opportunity to talk about their experience, and to make available to them services and safe spaces in which they feel secure and do not fear stigma.

The other practical implications are: 1. train service providers to prepare them to recognize youth’s preoccupations related to stigma and help them cope; 2. emphasize service providers’ relational and cultural competencies to build a trusting relationship with each youth; 3. educate these professionals and the public to recognize and deactivate mental health stigma2.

Other youth mental health infographics are available on the ACCESS Open Minds website: Resources – ACCESS Open Minds.

For more information, do not hesitate to contact us:

References:

  1. Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child & Youth Mental Health (2019). What is knowledge mobilization? http://www.kmbtoolkit.ca/what-is-kmb
  2. Tranchant CC, Iancu P, Dubé A, Bourdon L, Clair L, Doucet D, Dezetter A, Robichaud S, Malchow J, Joachin A, Beaton AM (2019). Expériences de la stigmatisation en lien avec la santé mentale chez des jeunes de trois communautés au Nouveau-Brunswick [Experiences of stigma related to mental illness among youth in three New Brunswick communities]. Reflets : Revue d’intervention sociale et communautaire, 25(2), 36-64. https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ref/2019-v25-n2-ref05108/1067043ar/