Supported Education in a Swedish Context – Opportunities and Challenges for Developing Career-Oriented Support for Young Adults with Mental Health Problems

Abstract

Young adults experiencing mental health problems often need both individual support and educational accommodations to successfully complete their studies. Recent research also points to the need for careerrelated, educational services in a labor market that increasingly demands formal education or training.The aim of this study was to investigate the development of supported education services in Sweden, in relation to pursuing educational and vocational goals. Interviews were conducted with a broad sample of stakeholders who are currently developing supported education services, as well as young adults utilizing educational support.The results suggest a number of key factors for accommodating the needs of these students which include, in addition to basic academic, mental health and individual supports, attention to economic challenges, social contexts and improved mental health literacy for educational actors. The results additionally substantiate the relevance of educational supports to long-term vocational goals when providing employment support services.

Integrating Interventions That Can Support a Career-Oriented Recovery for Young Adults: Building on the Supported Education Knowledge Base

“…Several of the studies suggested a need to work with attitudes regarding mental health challenges for students, since among educational actors, there is an impression that higher education may not be an achievable goal for some of these individuals (e.g. [5,36,39]). Students described a variety of challenges and needs, such as a lack of knowledge about the services available at universities [13], or that they felt insecure in discussing their mental health challenges and seeking available supports (e.g.…”

“…There seems therefore to be a clear necessity for support and guidance from several different stakeholders with varied responsibilities to collaborate in supporting these needs (e.g. [18,36]). An additional challenge described was that of identifying ongoing funding for services [25,38].…”

“…In addition to the expected psychosocial needs that may be attributed to the individual experience of illness and impairment, stigma, social isolation and the interruption of life cycle appropriate achievements, a surprising number of needs were identified which were related to what might be considered a societal inability to meet the educational needs of individuals experiencing mental health problems (compare [36]). The combination of the individual impairments and the lack of readiness on the part of the community-based educational systems to meet these needs, were in turn often connected to interruptions in establishing a longterm participation in the work market and a risk for marginalization ( Table 1).…”

“…Many of these adaptations seemed to develop in relation to the local resources, the population funders were prioritizing, needs in the local community, participating stakeholders in the local community and the variety/ availability of collaboration partners (e.g. [3,9,16,36,40,46,64]). More recent trends in the literature suggest that while traditional SEd models have naturally included young adults, integrated models which are based on IPS principles, have only recently begun to prioritize this target group.…”

“…Individualized support that follows the student over time is described as a basic component in the services provided (e.g. [8,18,25,36,39,42,51,60]). The support is most often described as provided by an SEd-specialist, although in some cases the educational focus may be part of a broader responsibility area [17,39].…”