School`s out with fever: service provider perspectives of youth with mental health struggles

Abstract

Youth struggling with mental health issues is a major concern in Norway and other Western countries. As is the increasing rate of youth unemployment combined with high rates of disengagement from education. Rather than receiving support to complete their education or find work, they are often given a psychiatric diagnosis that may camouflage the social nature of their problems. Therefore, a multidisciplinary approach to meeting the needs of the population is called for. Through qualitative and dialogical methods, this study explores how service providers on an outreach team understand why youth are in need of care and what is considered quality care. The article raises issues about the difficulties of youth in an essential societal arena as school. The findings contributes to knowledge on how to develop a collaborative practice in a field of tensions between contradictory policies that require recovery-oriented practice within a discourse of pathologizing youth troubling.

Inner and Outer Voices in Research: How Dialogical Approaches Can Enhance Knowledge Development in Mental Healthcare

“…The study forms part of the first author’s PhD, which has a collaborative research design and consists of three sub‐studies. Sub‐study 1 focuses on dialogical workshops with the service providers of the outreach mental health team focusing on their perspectives of mental health services for young people (Soggiu, Klevan, Davidson, & Karlsson, 2019). Sub‐study 2 consists of interviews with young service users and their relatives with the focus on collaboration around services in recovery processes (Soggiu, Klevan, Davidson, & Karlsson, 2020).…”

A sort of friend: narratives from young people and parents about collaboration with a mental health outreach team

“…Service users could be referred by other parts of the welfare system, or through self-or family-based referral. What kind of services the team provided was decided in a collaboration between service user and service provider (Soggiu, Klevan, Davidson, & Karlsson, 2019). The team was a local, community-based social and health service that supported young people to enable school-or work-related activities, provide training in social skills, and coordinate different welfare-system services.…”

“…The relationship between the service user and provider in itself is emphasized in these recovery processes (Denhov & Topor, 2012). Practicing as service providers in the mental health field require practitioners to navigate in an area of tensions created by contradictory policies that require recovery-oriented practice within a discourse of pathologizing mental health issues (Ekeland, 2011;Soggiu et al, 2019). If we are to listen to what services users have told us in this study as well as in other studies, we have to develop a practice where relationships are based on equality, and also have a personal component to contribute in recovery processes.…”

“…In a different study of the outreach team by the first author, a finding was that the outreach team struggled with the notion of professionalism when dialoguing about closeness and distance in relationships between themselves and the service users (Soggiu et al, 2019). What is considered professional does not involve using one's own life experiences and creating a more personal relationship with the service users.…”