Youth face obstacles to mental healthcare

Deep-rooted cultural stigmas surrounding mental health in the Caribbean are obstructing early detection and care for adolescents, a regional health expert has said.

Professor Simon Anderson, director of the Chronic Disease Research Centre at the Caribbean Institute for Health Research, said that these stigmas were identified by young people themselves.

Stigma included issues such as “economics, education, simple things like height, weight, size, all those physical issues, simple things in relation to what people say, how people speak to you,” Anderson said during a question and answer session at the 69th Annual Health Research Conference hosted by the Caribbean Public Health Agency on Wednesday.

Anderson added that ethnic background and geographic location further compounded these challenges.

“Whether you’re from an indigenous community or you live in a community, say, that is not very pretty when you’re going to school, all these issues combine and challenge the individual.”

But stigma is not the only obstacle, he said. Other challenges to support for vulnerable youth include institutional readiness.

“What is the readiness status, in terms of the availability of mental health providers, guidance counsellors, teachers? Are they ready to spot problems and to deal with them in respect to stigmas?,”he asked

Anderson advocated for a grounded, individual-first approach to policy and intervention.

“Start with the individual first and from that perspective, get an understanding of what are key challenges and barriers, and then try to address those directly.”

Based on research carried out, some barriers identified were of a cultural nature, he said, and included bullying and class-based exclusion.

“We have a project in Dominica at the present time… and what we found emerging from the child’s perspective was this matter of bullying, the matter of differences in terms of where one lives, access to wealth or the lack of access to wealth,” Anderson said.

The research he and his colleague have conducted uses a community-based co-design model to explore and address these barriers.

“Our strategy has been to adopt the image gap system—to make it culturally relevant for the setting and to train individuals within the community as the sort of early responders.

“So we need to make sure that we have a starting point… and then they can be escalated up the ladder in terms of treatment, intervention, and care,” Anderson said.

(SZB)