Accessing mental health services for a child living with anxiety: Parents’ lived experience and recommendations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Little research attention has been given to understanding the lived experience of parents who access mental health services in the context of child anxiety disorders. This paper reports on findings specific to parents' lived experience of accessing services for their child living with anxiety and the recommendations they provided for improving access. METHODS: We used the qualitative research approach of hermeneutic phenomenology. The sample included 54 Canadian parents of youth living with an anxiety disorder. Parents took part in one semi-structured and one open-ended interview. We used a 4 staged data analysis process informed by van Manen's approach and Levesque and colleagues' framework of access to healthcare. RESULTS: The majority of parents reported being female (85%), white (74%), and single parents (39%). Parents' ability to seek and obtain services was affected by not knowing when or where to access services, having to learn to navigate the system, limited availability of services, lack of timely services and interim supports, limited financial resources, and clinicians' dismissal of parental concerns and knowledge. Provider (ability to listen), parent (willingness to participate in therapy), child (same race/ethnicity as provider), and service characteristics (cultural sensitivity) influenced whether parents perceived services as approachable, acceptable, and appropriate. Parents' recommendations focused on: (1) improving the availability, timeliness, and coordination of services, (2) providing supports for parents and the child to facilitate obtaining care (education, interim supports), (3) improving communication with and among healthcare professionals, (4) the need to recognize parents' experience-based knowledge, and (5) encouraging parents to take care of themselves and advocate for their child. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings point to possible avenues (parents' ability, service characteristics) that can be targeted to improve service access. As experts on their situation, parents' recommendations highlight priority needs of relevance to health care professionals and policymakers.
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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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".