Our Meeting with Youth Move

On November 20th our group met with Youth Move.  In the days before the meeting we discussed as a group the direction of how we wanted the meeting to go.  We decided that it would be best to keep our first meeting with Youth Move more informal, and mostly just get to know each other and talk about mental health stigma.  All of our group members were present in the planning leading up to the meeting, but due to schedule conflicts, Chase, Annika, and Mary Beth represented our group at the November 20th meeting with Youth Move.  The three of us meet Youth Move at NAMI's South Salt Lake office, where we had a great conversation about mental health stigma.  Youth Move is a group of young people who have lived with mental illness.  The Youth Move group was very open to the impact that mental health stigma has had on their lives.  A few of the group members gave us personal stories about what mental health stigma looked like in their experience.  Talking with the members of Youth Move further reinforced the importance of this issue, especially among young people.  Many of our group's assumptions about the consequences of mental health stigma proved to be correct, but we also were shown things that we perhaps had not focused as much on.  Many of the group members described their own experiences with mental illness stigma with less overt actions towards them then I may have expected, but they said even worse was the silence.  Stigma manifested itself in friends or classmates beginning to distance themselves from them.  Some group members even joked that they would have wanted a more overt approach by others.  Overall we believe our meeting was very successful.  Youth Move is open to continue our discussion, and to work with us in any way we need.  They seem to be a great resource for us to learn more about this issue, but also in helping us find an intervention to the problem of mental health stigma among children and teens.

Our 5th Meeting

We have met several times since the last blog and continue to make progress.  All five us were there.  We divvied up sections of the final paper and are all looking into literature to support our separate sections.  Chase took the initiative to write the beginning of it so we could all be on the same page before starting.  Thanks Chase!  Speaking of thanks, a big one goes out to Mary Beth for being the point lady with Youth Move and narrowing down questions to send to them prior to us meeting with them next Thursday.  We narrowed down a dozen questions to just a few in hopes to hear from more members in a short time frame.  Hopefully we can make it an environment where all members, even the quiet ones have a voice.  The possibility of breaking into smaller groups may be beneficial.  We are excited to have greater perspective after this meeting.  We hope that this continues to narrow our focus and give us clarity in our direction.

The questions are as follows:

Is stigma a problem for you and the other kids that you know?

If so, what does that look like?  Your feelings?  Your everyday life?

Do you have any ideas about how to reduce stigma for kids?

In addition to this we discussed talking to parents with children with mental illness about stigma and barriers to treatment.  We talked about the question of what they might need to better deal with stigma themselves or with their kids.  We discussed the possibility of interviewing parents of the kids in Youth Move.  Robert was also interested in the perception of kids that do not have mental illness and how we could ethically get a population to interview.  He and Chase talked about the possibility of getting a group together at their work.  Anikka thought that she could do the same.  Scott said that he has been talking to kids and their parents about this in his practicum.  He suggested that if we wanted to narrow things down further, that he talks daily with kids and their parents about additional stigmas in the Latino community.  We then discussed how this is the case in other minority groups in the valley. 

Finally, we appreciate the feedback from Lindsay.  The suggestion for looking into literature on interventions and stigma education in schools was valuable.  In response to the question on ensuring sustainability, it is a big reason that we feel good about making a connection with NAMI and Youth Move.  It helps to know that if we move forward with them, then they can use the work we are doing in the future.  It isn’t just an assignment that will be done when we are done with school. 

Scott

Our Fourth Meeting

Our group met on October 23, to discuss the progress of our project.  The members of our group are: Chase, Mary Beth, Anikka, Scott, and Robert and we were all present at this meeting.  We started by revisiting our objective for the project to be sure that we are all on a uniform page in our communications.  We all agreed that the objective is to assist in lowering stigma among children and adolescents with mental illness. 

We talked about which community partners to meet with and share information.  As a group, we agreed that when we meet with community partners we will not make any promises that we will work on the same issues and follow the same plan.  This is good for us to not be distracted from our glass objectives and yet be part of the communities we will work with.  One community partner we will work with is the NAMI youth group called the Youth Move.  Mary Beth who is one of the group members arranged a meeting for our group to meet with the leaders of the Youth Move on November 20th.  All of us may not be at the meeting so we agreed we would have our questions and objective specified before going to this meeting. 

The other partner we thought of working with is Rowland High school.  We did not come up with clear ways of how we would work with this school and one possibility is that we would provide the teachers with information of how to prevent stigma and probably present our material to the school staff and students.  In some of our coming meetings we will decide how we want to work with this school.  Our most important agreement was that we want to think of the partners we want to work with but only meet a few this year and most of them next semester.

Robert

Our Third Meeting

During class, our group developed a list of stakeholders we would like to talk with to gather information, as well as began developing open-ended interview questions to use when we talk with these stakeholders. Our list of stakeholders includes: administrators at mental health facilities (such as Primary Children’s Behavioral Health and UNI), therapists who work with children and adolescents, psychiatric technicians, school teachers, principals, religious leaders, parents, children, and adolescents. The open-ended questions are: (1) How do you believe/find that children or adolescents with mental health problems are treated? (2) How does stigma affect children/adolescents…? We are beginning to reach out to the stakeholders at our workplaces and/or practicum settings. Chase and Robert talked about reaching out to the stakeholders at UNI, Scott talked about reaching out to the stakeholders at his practicum with Wasatch School District, Mary Beth talked about reaching out to NAMI, and I (Anikka) am beginning to reach out to stakeholders at my practicum at Primary Children’s Behavioral Health. Some specific updates: I (Anikka) spoke with a psychiatric technician and a residential administrator at my practicum who had very different views on where stigma for adolescents comes from, but both agreed that it is a real issue that our clients face. Mary Beth reached out to NAMI and found out about a program called Youth Move, which is a local program with about 35 members ages 12-25 that works on local community and policy projects. Mary Beth found out when their meetings are and at our next group discussion we will discuss attending one of their meetings and learning about their projects.

Our Second Meeting 9/24/14

During the short break today, Chase, Anika, Scott, Robert and Mary Beth met briefly in relation to Lindsay’s suggestion that we narrow our topic, stigmatizing mental illness, but we were unable to all meet at the same time. The discussion went to the possibility of targeting children and/or adolescents specifically, working with NAMI to recreate some form of their now defunct Stigmabuster program, or simply advocating for destigmatizing efforts in schools. One concern that arose surrounded the wisdom of targeting only children when their parents themselves so often need such education. The consensus is, however, that focusing on children and schools is more important. Over the next week, we will all consider this question and concerns that surround it in preparation for making a final decision on 10/2. At that meeting we will also share what each has already learned through research and community contacts with regard to the problem of stigmatizing mental illness. Submitted by Mary Beth Fitzpatrick

The begining of the journey

Over the last week, we have formed our Macro project group.  Our group formed over our shared interest in mental health.  When we broke up into groups with shared topic interests, the group we started with, was the group we will move forward with.  Our group consists of Chase Knaphus, Robert Kagab, Anikka Hoidal, Scott Hove, and Mary Beth Fitzpatrick.  We were all present, and we all participated in a lively discussion about the direction and topic of our group, eventually setting on the topic of mental health stigma.  We all believe that the stigmaization of mental health disorders is a major problem, and we hope that there is something we can do to remedy the problem in some way.  To get the group wheels moving forward, we decided as a group that each of us would do some initial research on the topic, and we would also try and tap into each of our contacts in the field.  We also decided that we would take turns writing the blog post, with Chase going first.  We are excited to begin this journey, and hope that we can do something that will have an impact.

Mental Health Stigma Group- Chase Knaphus