If you are looking for urgent mental health support, call 988 if you are in the US or Canada or you can visit www.kidshelpphone.ca if you are under 25 to access volunteer crisis responders or a professional counsellor.
How are multiple and compounding crises, impacting the mental health & wellbeing of children and youth?
IMAGINING FUTURES
What does a livable future look & feel like, for queer, trans and non-binary youth? How can imagining a liveable future help us survive threats to our wellbeing, today?
Imagining Futures is a research program to improve mental health equity for 2SLGBTQIA+ youth. Our interdisciplinary research team (hyperlink to team page of the other site) received support from the New Brunswick Health Research Foundation (NBHRF), Mental Health Research Canada (MHRC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to do arts-based participatory action research with youth and to develop innovative, and youth-driven knowledge mobilization resources for educators, GSAs and youth-serving organizations to support resilience and mental health equity for youth who are at risk of self-harm or suicide. You can learn more about our work here.
How can we mobilize knowledge through our imaginations, to improve mental health equity for queer, trans and Two spirit youth?
We’ve Survived Before
We brought youth and elders together for a participatory action research project to explore community resilience from 2SLGBTQIA+ elders who survived the AIDS epidemic. We supported 2SLGBTQIA+ youth to learn from community elders and then worked together to create a COVID-19-specific mental health program for their peers. Our curriculum guide was then used in New Brunswick high schools to support queer and trans youth during and after lockdown. We also created a zine, which has been distributed across Canada, with hundreds of copies provided through queer and trans organizations, bookstores, libraries and in schools through GSAs.
Imagining Livable Futures
In 2018 we began an arts-based participatory action research project for queer, trans, Two-spirit and non-binary youth to generate artwork in response to prompts about what a liveable future might look like for them as a strategy promoting survival, mental health equity and wellbeing.
RESOURCES
Imagining Futures – Curriculum Guide
Belonging: An intergenerational program for queer, trans, and non-binary youth
In consultation with our youth participants, we created a mental health support program currently being piloted across New Brunswick high schools. We created these program pages that detail the inspiration, goals, and session activities for each week of the pilot program.
Imagining Futures – Zine
Survival Tips from Queer Elders
In consultation with our elder participants, we created a zine called “Survival Tips from Queer Elders,” which contains messages of support and encouragement from our elder participants to queer youth. Click the links below to download. For a free printed copy, please send your name and mailing address to: imaginingfuturesresearch@gmail.com.
YOUNG WOMEN, BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER AND PRISONS
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is one of the most highly stigmatized diagnoses in the DSM. While working as an arts program facilitator with young women in the maximum-security unit of a Federal women’s prison, Ardath discovered that every single woman, or non-binary person in the max unit had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. In 2008, the high profile killing of Ashley Smith, by correctional services Canada, put a spotlight on BPD as a diagnosis that is disproportionately incarcerated & inspired a research-creation Doctoral project.
The Now(here) project was a digital installation that ‘diffractively engaged’ with lived experience and various types of ‘evidence’ about BPD. The installation was designed as an inverse approach to science education, where participants are invited to learn about BPD diffractively and with attention to the implications in the lives of affected women. Materialist feminisms and controversy mapping approaches to science engagement allowed for new techniques to address ‘marks on bodies’ (Barad, 2007) in ethical ways, while allowing for education and engagement with experts positioned within biomedical and legal institutions. You can read more about the installation and similar ‘making & doing’ experiments in science education in the 4th Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016). You can read more about the project in Volume, 4 Issue 1 of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory Technoscience.
YOUTH AGAINST STIGMA
The YOUth Against Stigma Project was initiated and developed with the youth advisory council of Teenmentalhealth.org, which was housed at the IWK Health Centre between 2011 and 2014. The Youth Against Stigma project brought youth from the inpatient unit (previously called 4South) to a local coffeeshop, to participate in an open mic and art show once a month, where outpatient youth with lived experience of mental illness, other local junior and high school students, youth organizations and adult performing artists and musicians would all take the stage together to fight the stigma impacting youth with lived experience of mental illness. The project was intended as a one-off event to provide off-site rec therapy opportunities for inpatient youth, but it turned into a long-running performance series, facilitated by Ardath Whynacht, but largely driven by a coalition of young artists who struggled with mood disorders, psychosis and/or self harm behaviours. The project ran for 5 years, with total audiences estimated at over 3000 people over the 5-year span, featuring award-winning local recording artists alongside youth sharing their paintings and poetry about their time in inpatient care. You can learn more about this project here.
One of the young artists responsible for our YOUth Against Stigma project was Rowan Ducklow. Rowan was a gifted artist and passionate mental health peer support worker. We lost Rowan to their on-going battle with Bipolar Disorder in 2023. You can learn more about their work here.