OUR VOICE MATTERS is a collaborative project by CAMH’s Youth Engagement Initiative and HealthyDebate.ca.
Inspired by Healthy Debate’s Faces of Health Care section, this project set out to release a special edition series of interviews and multimedia content. Featured are youth with lived experience of mental illness, telling their stories their way and highlighting the projects they are involved in to help improve the systems they use. Content will be co-released on healthydebate.ca
The Youth Engagement Initiative (YEI) facilitates collaboration between young people who have lived experience of mental health and/or substance use challenges and clinicians, researchers, and other decision-makers at CAMH. Youth in the YEI play a key role in system and service planning, education and research activities. They participate in many different ways, from active project partners to providing consultation and advice to guide work within CAMH and in the broader community. Collaborating with youth results in project and program goals, activities and outcomes that are more relevant and better reflect the needs of youth.
Work within the Initiative is supported by the Margaret and Wallace McCain Centre for Child, Youth and Family Mental Health and the Child, Youth and Emerging Adult Program.
CAMH’s Youth Advisory Group is a team of over 20 youth who meet monthly at CAMH. Members draw from their lived experience to provide feedback on projects and programs at CAMH and within the community.
Below are some of the projects mentioned in OUR VOICE MATTERS.
WISH List aims to identify the core components that are perceived to be the most important to include in an integrated youth mental health service hub. By collecting feedback from youth, caregivers, and service providers, this project is helping us better understand youth mental health and addictions service preferences, with a view to guiding service design. WISH List is a CIHR-funded study through the Margaret and Wallace McCain Centre for Child, Youth and Family Mental Health.
For more information, please contact lisa.hawke@camh.ca
YouthCan IMPACT is a collaborative initiative of youth, families, community agencies, primary care partners and hospitals in Toronto, who work together to improve the youth mental health and addiction system. The YouthCan IMPACT team is conducting a research project to evaluate the benefits of an Integrative Collaborative Care Team approach and to compare the effectiveness of Integrative Collaborative Care Teams to hospital outpatient psychiatric services. The study focuses on youth aged 14 to 18 and is coordinated by the McCain Centre for Child, Youth & Family Mental Health at CAMH.
Youth and family advisors have been involved right from the start. The project is committed to engaging youth and families in all stages: project design, development and implementation. This includes having youth and family representation on the core team as well as advisory groups.
Game Changers is a new mental health initiative and partnership between the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and Hudson’s Bay Foundation. The Game Changers for mental health program aims to help young people feel more comfortable talking about mental health and well-being, seeking help and supporting their friends.
Game Changers has created a hub of resources to help start conversations about health, mental health, and looking after yourself. These tools have been co-created with CAMH’s clinical and education team alongside youth ambassadors to ensure they reflect informed research with a youth perspective.
Healthy Debate is a website focused on health care and health policy issues in Canada, with a monthly readership of well over 100,000. Faces of Health Care is a photojournalism initiative that tells the stories of people who are using and working in Ontario’s health care system.
Our hope is to produce three to four multimedia features that profile those with healthcare lived experience. If you would like to collaborate with Healthy Debate on one of our future features, please email us at contactus@healthydebate.ca
