Presenters
- Katharine Larose-Hébert, MSW, PhD Professeure régulière Programme psychologie et santé mentale Département des Sciences Humaines, Lettres et Communication Université TÉLUQ Montréal Québec
Summary
In this communication, we focus on the experiences of young adults aged 18 to 35 years old accessing institutional and community-based mental health care services, defining the place, role and effect of these care trajectories in young adults’ lives. Our results come from the analysis of 30 interviews with young adults living with mental-related issues or diagnoses as well as 15 mental health care or social service workers involved in services for young adults living with mental health-related issues. One of our goals was to better understand the changing needs of this population and how services were adapting to their changing realities, in a context where experiences of transition into adulthood are also becoming more diverse. We also looked at how their different social and professional trajectories were articulated with institutional care trajectories. More specifically, we turn to defining how an increasing number of young adults who have accessed mental health care services in post-secondary institutions learn to use the knowledge they have developed and the diagnoses they have received in the process to facilitate access to services in other situations, outside of their education trajectory. In contrast, young adults who chose not to pursue post-secondary education, or were unable to, report more issues accessing mental health care-related services, including involuntary hospitalizations and experiences with health and social services characterized as traumatic.
Objectives
- Understand the various mental health care trajectories followed by young adults
- Define the main socio-intergration difficulties of young adults living with mental health issues
- Understand how social inegalities influence accessibility to mental health care