MEN-MINDs Project: Co-producing change for better mental health for adolescent young men at the margins

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The mental health and wellbeing of adolescents has been getting worse over time and the COVID-19 pandemic has also had a negative impact on young people's mental health. The mental health of adolescents has been described as being at a crisis point. While adolescent females are often perceived to be at higher rates of internalising disorders such as anxiety and depression, males are more likely to be diagnosed with behavioural disorders. These diagnosis rates reflect not only underlying mental health issues, but also other factors such as help-seeking behaviours, the availability of mental health support and how services work with young people. Young males are at greater risk of poor mental health and wellbeing outcomes in key health and wellbeing areas such as suicide and substance use. This might be because young men are less likely to seek help for emotional, psychological or other distressing problems, or it might be that the symptoms of distress in young men are different and are less recognised by young people, parents or professionals. Young men are also less likely to take part in mental health research, so it is difficult for researchers and mental health professionals to fully understand why these differences exist. Certain groups of young men are also more likely to be excluded or discriminated against in society, such as young men who get in to conflict with the law, who identify as LGBTQ+, or who have migrated to the UK. These young men are at greater risk of poor mental health outcomes because of their life experiences, and are even less likely to have their mental health needs addressed or to participate in research. The primary aim of MEN-MINDs project is to advance adolescent mental health research by improving understanding of how we can effectively engage marginalised adolescent males in research on mental health and how services can improve support available to them.The MEN-MINDs project aims to address this gap in knowledge over three stages of work. A Young People's Forum (YPF) will have a central role in producing the research and sharing the findings with other audiences. The YPF will consist of 9-12 adolescent males who will work with our team as co-researchers to design new ways of doing research that are more interesting, relevant, or easier for young males to take part in. We will share these research tools with other researchers so that they can also use the methods in their own research. We will then use the research tools created by our co-researchers to carry out research with 60-80 young males who are in one of the vulnerable groups we identified: in conflict with the law; LGBTQ+ (including transgender men); or migrants. This will allow us to find out how they think about their masculine identities, what mental health and wellbeing means to them and what changes to policies or services would encourage them to seek help for mental health. We will work with mental health or other support organisations to implement these changes with the aim of improving both young males' experiences of service provision and the outcomes of mental health support. The project is innovative because it seeks to understand the impact of young people's complex identities on their mental health and help-seeking behaviours and because new methods of research will be co-produced with young people from the three groups affected. The study will fill a gap in information about adolescents' help-seeking behaviours and the methods of research they are comfortable with when discussing mental health. It will produce evidence to help other researchers and service providers to evaluate and understand masculine identities and help-seeking behaviours among three of the most marginalised groups. This will also lead to improvements in mental health research, services and policy for adolescent males.