Youth ages 15-24 are more likely to experience mental illness than any other age group, as 1 in 7 youth will present with a mental illness. Despite this, youth have lower rates of mental health service utilization due to barriers preventing access or sustained access to the mental healthcare system. As half of lifetime mental illnesses will present before the age of 15, and three quarters before 18, it’s important that youth feel safe and seen by the mental health care system. Stigma, confidentiality breeches and fear of being perceived as ‘attention seeking’ and mistrust of service providers were common barriers to youth accessing mental health services.
Many different attributes and values are accredited to the youth-centred practitioner. Still, the most central of them is that the youth-centred practitioner prioritizes the youth before all else. And so, while not a perfect definition, if a youth-centred practitioner was to be identified by only one attribute, it would be that they prioritize the youth that they serve. This quality of a youth-centred practitioner serves as the first part of the answer to the question, what is youth-centred practice?
One reason that prioritizing the youth is so important to youth-centred practice is that by doing so, service providers can avoid wasting time on standard treatments unwanted by the youth and, therefore, unlikely to be of much use. A complaint brought up by service providers, youth, and their families interviewed was that the one size fits all, uniform treatments that have become standard throughout the mental health care system do not always help the youth who receive them. When care is youth-centred, service providers learn to be flexible in how they work and avoid “cookie-cutter” treatments that do not necessarily fit each youth a service provider.
“I’ve found that most kids, this is something my supervisor told me, and I’ve made a mantra, but kids do well if they can. So, if they can’t and they’re not doing well, it’s because they can’t. No one wants to be the bad kid. So, everything for me comes down to looking at their experience and figuring out what’s the lagging skill and it’s just all about skill development from there.” – Reflection from a service provider
