‘Kids have really no way to access support, especially without their parents knowing’: a qualitative study of access to mental health support among adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We explored adolescents' perceived barriers and facilitators to accessing formal and informal mental health support during the COVID-19 pandemic response. In this qualitative descriptive study, 30 semi-structured online interviews were conducted between June and August 2021 with adolescents (13-18 years old, 53.3% girls) living in Canada and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes were constructed: 1) perceptions of others being unable to understand and/or help them, 2) discomfort disclosing concerns to a potential helper, 3) concerns about parents and/or peers finding out due to questioned privacy and confidentiality, particularly in the school context, and 4) perceptions about their capacity to access formal support. Themes were related to participants' perceptions of parent/guardian and peer beliefs regarding mental health and help seeking. Parents were experienced as gatekeepers to adolescents' access to mental health services and resources. This study highlights the importance of considering adolescent development in accessibility, particularly their increasing autonomy. Despite schools often being regarded as the ideal location to first connect youth with mental health services, adolescents continue to experience many barriers to seeking and accessing help within this context. Results have implications for improving access to mental health support for adolescents beyond the pandemic, both within and outside of schools.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".