Design and Delivery of Public Mental Health Programming for First Nations Youth: Federal, Provincial, Regional, and Community Approaches to Youth Engagement in Northwestern Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public mental health programming aims to address mental health at a population level, and must therefore consider the interconnectedness of determinants of health, and their distinctions between First Nations communities.In Ontario, public mental health programming on-reserve has been described as a piecemeal of policies and legislation between governments, regional authorities, and community-based services.Regional organizations publish publicly about their program development processes, many of which highlight the importance of youth engagement.Youth engagement in decision-making that affects their lives can improve program relevance, and influence participating youths' wellbeing.This project was guided by three lines of inquiry: how federal, provincial, regional, and community-level organizations approach public mental health programming for First Nations youth living on reserve in northwestern Ontario; the ways in which they each use youth engagement methods, and; the experiences from engagement opportunities as perceived by both youth and adults.Interview data were collected between May 2019 and January 2022 to unpack programmatic approaches to public mental health and youth engagement methods used as defined by the McCain Model of Youth Engagement (Heffernan et al., 2017).The Youth-Adult Survey (Jones & Perkins, 2006) and the Youth Experiences Survey (Hansen & Larson, 2002) were administered to First Nations youth and youth workers in community between June and July 2021 to compare engagement experiences between participating youth and adults.Findings from this project reveal that public mental health programming is mostly designed and delivered by regional and community-level organizations, though rigorous reporting and iii evaluation requirements to sustain funding were significant challenges.Funding and designing programs for youth living on-reserve must be rooted in strengths-based approaches, as well as informed by challenges in community contexts.Regional and community-level organizations in northwestern Ontario most often engaged with youth, and used various methods of engagement; however, contextual factors, as well as historical and ongoing trauma, influenced both youth and adult allyship.Renewing the approach to public mental health for First Nations living on-reserve in northwestern Ontario will require renewed relationships between First Nations and governments that ensure inclusion of Indigenous epistemologies throughout design and decisionmaking.sewing round, I brought it to the Elder, and asked for guidance on the next step.She spoke to me in the language, and my co-worker turned to me: "She says stop being lazy and do it the right way from the beginning."There were many times during this dissertation where I would need to remind myself of that advice.Turns out, there aren't many corners that can be cut in the making of a medicine bag, nor a dissertation.To my supervisor Kim Matheson, thank you for believing in me from before the outset of this degree.Your support to apply to the program, to develop a robust project direction, and throughout the gruelling months of drafts and re-drafts, was unmeasurably helpful.To my supervisor Katherine Graham, thank you for being a bridge for me between the sciences and policy.Including endless thoughtful comments on drafts, light-hearted facilitation of meetings, and humorous encouragement in the last stages
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".