Youth have a Say in Mental Health Research

Posted on 20/05/2011 | 0 Comments

A recent Australian media report describes an “innovative approach to mental health research”: http://melbourne-leader.whereilive.com.au/your-news/story/what-works-4-ur-new-website-investigating-treatments-for-mental-health-problems-in-youth/. 
 
This is a website where young people who have received mental health care can rate what they think was helpful to them. Good idea, but hardly new.
 
Our group in Toronto published an academic study on this question in the 1990’s in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. And, last year, the Institute for Families published its report of a national consultation involving youth, parents and researchers from across Canada in which the issue of what should be mental health research priorities in our country. This report was the outcome of shared consultations that may help identify national child and youth mental health research priorities for our national and provincial health granting councils.
 
Regardless of pride of place with the idea – it’s essential that young people and their families be involved in the identification of what should be researched. Those who provide clinical care and those who do research can only do what they do best when they are informed by those they work with – patients. I can still remember when one of my patients, a young girl with a manic episode told me that the mood rating scale I had given her to fill out made no sense – because it did not have a place to mark down depressed or low mood. When I changed the scale with her help we made the discovery that manic episodes in young people fluctuated widely in their mood levels. And when we applied this new measurement technique to scores of other young people we were able to describe for the first time, the now understood to be “classic” description of mania in teenagers: mixed rapid cyclic manic episodes. And that is only one example.
 
So what does this tell us? What good health providers have known for centuries. Listen to your patients. Involve them respectfully as full partners in their care. Learn from them.
 
--Stan

Photo Credit: Kipp Jones

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This is a great set of comments and rings very true. 

I totally agree that scientists (just like everyone else) have their biases and foibles.  After all, scientists are human beings too!  But science is different than scientists. 

The scientific method is the most objective frame that we have by which to evaluate and predict.  Science is not about finding truth.  It is only about being less wrong most of the time.  The scientific method (experimental design and mathematics) gives us the ability to test what we believe.  The scientific method is not used to prove something is correct, on the contrary, the scientific method is designed to prove that something is not correct!  It is designed to test what is called the “null hypothesis”.  It takes ideas that come out of left field (or wherever else they come from) and puts those ideas to an independent test.

t does not drive our beliefs.  It does however challenge our beliefs.  In that way it is self-correcting. Of course scientific inquiry and understanding lives within a wider social context.  That is one of the great features of science. 

But gravity is gravity, social context notwithstanding.  And thus it is nasty, brutish and long.  As Brecht said, (something like this) - the purpose of science is to save us from everlasting error.

By Christina Carew on May 11th

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