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.