Coping Mechanisms of Youth of African Descent Accessing Mental Health and Substance Use Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper highlights how youth of African descent address their mental health and substance use (MHSU) problems in Nova Scotia. Data was collected from youth participants aged 18-25 through semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and focus group discussions (n = 8 groups). The research participants identified four primary coping strategies: receiving non-judgmental support and space; managing stigma by withholding information or treatment from family; drawing on family as a source of healing; and preferring collective approaches to recovery over individual therapy. The findings emphasize the interaction between youth resilience and collective practices in how participating youth of African descent navigate between informal support networks, cultural practices, and limited formal services to determine how they respond to and manage their MHSU challenges. Feedback from youth participants stress the need for culturally informed, and community-embedded interventions that balance individual care practices with collective ways of healing. It is also essential for mental health services to recognize the complexities of stigma, family dynamics and influence, and cultural fit to the well-being of health-seeking youth.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".