Call to Action

Click here to view the Call to Action banner that was developed in March 2018

ASI Call to Action to Promote Child and Youth Mental Health 2017-2018

“When we think of mental health we often think of emotional difficulties and mental health problems and how we can resolve a crisis once it has occurred. This thinking demands an investment after the fact or ‘downstream’. ‘Upstream’ thinking means investing wisely for future success and addressing the broader determinants of mental health at a population level. We view mental health as a resource for all that requires a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach. Although there is evidence to support an ‘upstream’ view, our current investment in policies and practice is ‘downstream’ and we will need a change in public and political support to think and invest differently.”  – ASI 2017 keynote speaker, Professor Margaret Barry, WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Promotion Research, National University of Ireland, Galway.

INTRODUCTION

Raising healthy children is a responsibility of all Canadians. Supporting and promoting child and youth mental health is central to enabling them to become life-long, positive contributors to their communities and society. Strengthening policies and programs that support positive mental health for children and youth is vital to creating a sustainable and inclusive Atlantic Canada.

The Atlantic Summer Institute on Healthy and Safe Communities (ASI) has provided an Atlantic platform for inter-sectoral collaboration to promote child and youth mental health in the region. ASI hosted a Symposium on Child and Youth Mental Health Promotion in 2015 to bring together a broad range of groups – public, non-profit, academic and private sectors, including education, health, community services, justice and community organizations – to find ways to have a collective impact to improve child and youth mental health. The emphasis is on mental health promotion, through upstream investment for downstream benefits.

Building on the momentum from the past 2 years of ASI programming, which focused on emerging evidence and best practices that promote positive child and youth mental health in schools and communities, ASI 2017 was designed to generate a Call to Action based on evidence for polices, programs and best practices discussed and showcased at the event. Two documents have been developed to inform discussions, an Atlantic Profile of Child and Youth Mental Health and a Backgrounder on Child and Youth Mental Health Promotion that has compiled research and evidence from a variety of sources to inform policies, programs and practices that support child and youth mental health.

The first public draft was posted on the ASI website in mid-July 2017, with communications going out to draw attention to it. A draft Call to Action was developed during ASI 2017. This updated Call to Action emerged from further consultation with participants at ASI 2018.

The success of this Call to Action will be in the hands of diverse stakeholders from Atlantic Canada, other provinces and territories, the federal government, and pan-Canadian organizations. Below we set out clear actions that can be taken up by various stakeholders to implement a more sustainable approach to promoting child and youth mental health.

GOAL AND OBJECTIVES

The goal of the Call to Action is to build on existing efforts to create a more sustainable approach to promoting child and youth mental health in Atlantic Canada.

The objectives of the Call to Action are to:

  1. Catalyze concrete, cross-sectoral responses for mental health promotion.
  2. Influence decision making in Atlantic Canada and across the country.

 

PRINCIPLES

We are using these principles as guideposts to action. Detailed definitions are in the Backgrounder.

  • Equity
  • Inclusion
  • Cultural Safety
  • Life-course Perspective
  • Respecting Rights of Children
  • Respecting Voices of Lived Experience
  • Respecting Truth and Reconciliation Commission
  • Mental Health in All Policies
  • Evidence-based Decision Making
  • Sustainability of Policies and Programs
  • Whole-of-government approach
  • Whole-of-society approach

ENABLING CONDITIONS

These conditions are required to achieve our goal:

  • Common Language
  • Population Health Approach
  • Cross-sectoral Collaboration
  • Partnerships Committed to Common Goal
  • Capacity Building for Success
  • Policy and Program Integration
  • Outcome and Process Evaluation
  • Collective Impact
  • Return on Investment
  • Knowledge Sharing, Translation and Mobilization
  • Data Infrastructure to Inform Policy and Program Development
  • Two-continuum model – Wellbeing and Mental Health

THE EVIDENCE FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION ON MENTAL HEALTH PROMOTION 

This year is a defining moment for Canada and its many nations. The Report of the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation is the ultimate call to action, and perhaps the most pressing. There are many other organizations at the national, regional and provincial levels that are focusing on child and youth mental health. This Call to Action builds upon and makes strategic links to many existing provincial, territorial, and pan-Canadian strategies and policy reports. The Backgrounder prepared for this event provides a comprehensive overview of the evidence base that we are drawing on for this Call to Action. A few highlights are presented here as context for the actions outlined below.

  • First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework(2015) – Assembly of First Nations, Health Canada’s First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, the National Native Addictions Partnership Foundation, Native Mental Health Association, and other community mental health leaders.
  • Mental Health SummitMental Health Promotion and Mental Illness Prevention for All(2012). Hosted by Government of Manitoba and Healthy Child Manitoba.
  • Mental Health Summit Follow-up:Think Tank Proceedings Report (2013). Public Health Agency of Canada, Mental Health Commission of Canada, Manitoba Mental Health and Spiritual Health Care, and Healthy Child Manitoba.
  • Maximizing Social Impacts and Returns on Investment: Towards a Sustainable Prevention Infrastructure for Population Mental Health Promotion and Mental Illness Prevention in Canada (2014). Mental Health Summit Network.
  • Population Mental Health Promotion for Children and Youth – Topical Papers and Resources(2017) National Collaborating Centres for Public Health.
  • Positive Mental Health Toolkit, 2nd Ed. (2016), Pan-Canadian Joint Consortium for School Health.
  • The SEAK (Social and Emotional Learning for Kids) Project, funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada.
  • Positive Population Mental Health Surveillance Indicator Framework for Youth (2017). Public Health Agency of Canada.
  • State of the Child Report 2016 – New Brunswick: Office of the Child and Youth Advocate

All of these reports are pieces of the puzzle of child and youth mental health promotion. Taken together, a clear picture emerges. The Backgrounder puts them all together in one place for all to view.

ACTIONS

This Call to Action builds on the Mental Health Summit Network report, which outlines ways of building capacity for collective impact, choosing approaches for sustainable system transformation, advancing evidence on returns on investment for mental health promotion, promoting existing best and promising practices upon which future efforts can build, and implementing and sustaining programs, practices, and policies for promoting child and youth mental health.

The success of this Call to Action will be in the hands of diverse stakeholders from Atlantic Canada, starting with the premiers of the four Atlantic Provinces, the Council of Atlantic Premiers (CAP), other provinces and territories, the federal government, and pan-Canadian organizations. Below we set out clear actions that can be taken by governments, NGOs, researchers, and other stakeholders to implement more sustainable policies and programs for promoting child and youth mental health.


Policy

ACTION 1: For effective implementation of effective SEL programs, integrate them into school curricula.

ACTION 2: Increase accountability by using health economics modelling to assess health impacts and related costs of all policies.

ACTION 3: Have a dedicated, fully financed Health in All Policies Unit within departments responsible for mental health and hold departments responsible for managing health impacts.

ACTION 4: Educate policy makers to use the mental health continuum model (prevention, promotion, treatment, recovery), and other mental health frameworks, to support intersectoral policies and resourcing, linking upstream with downstream services.

ACTION 5: Monitor health impacts research related to the legalization of cannabis.

ACTION 6: Incorporate children and youth and indigenous perspectives, making them integral to our initiatives

ACTION 7: Ensure interdepartmental, and broad stakeholder collaboration in decision-making, including input from grassroots organizations and individuals with lived experience, to work towards a whole of society approach to child and youth mental health, as opposed to working in silos

ACTION 8: Increase investments in community-based promotion and protection of mental health in children and youth, and encourage flexible and sustainable funding for community organizations to respond to local needs, and to shift from small-scale projects to long-term programs.

ACTION 9: Ensure that policy actions regarding child and youth mental health are grounded in equity and accessibility

Programs

ACTION 1: Find ways of linking evidence for mental health promotion and mental illness prevention with front-line mental health services.

ACTION 2: Create and promote un-siloed system navigation services/supports to help children, youth, and families to access and navigate programs and services across the continuum.

ACTION 3: Support youth voice and insist on youth participation in program and/or research design.

ACTION 4: Increase funding and build capacity for not-for-profits to conduct program evaluation and impact research.

ACTION 5: Develop and scale up a holistic wellness community pilot project within each of the four Atlantic Provinces, to assist entire communities in assuming a child-centered and sustainable approach to mental wellness.

ACTION 6: Implement peer helping networks in schools, as well as school safety plans for students experiencing mental health challenges.

ACTION 7: Develop a resource hub for individuals, organizations, and government departments to access materials that respond to their diverse needs, including information on sustainable funding opportunities. Explore pursuing this by way of a co-op model.

ACTION 8: Utilize a strengths-based approach to community programming, which builds on community assets, bridges silos, and enhances community and inter-agency collaboration.

ACTION 9: Engage and empower service users, by involving them in the conversations with service providers and decision-makers.

ACTION 10: Increase the focus of programming on environment-level factors, as opposed to individual-level factors that impact child and youth mental health.

ACTION 11: invest in public spaces where groups can gather and foster connections.

Practices

ACTION 1: Advance the whole-of-person approach for the promotion of healthy and safe communities, situating children and families in their social, political, economic, and environmental contexts.

ACTION 2: Improve outreach of prevention and services to marginalized children, youth, and families.

ACTION 3: Invest in paid peer support.

ACTION 4: Build a Community of Practice for promoting child and youth mental health, including through involving the community and people with lived experience; getting to know community realities; sharing space, language, and culture; and promoting inclusion.

ACTION 5: Be humble, create safe spaces for learning, be careful not to shut people down, and be comfortable asking questions.

ACTION 6: Ground the education and training of professionals in the lived experience of the social determinants of mental health and sustainable development goals.

ACTION 7: Create continuity in the planning and provision of programs and policies, through multisectoral collaboration and interprofessional practice

ACTION 8: Increase awareness of the jurisdictional landscape within which programs and policies are being implemented, with regards to needs, priorities, and context.

ACTION 9: Bring a diverse people together to exchange ideas and perspectives, particularly Indigenous, youth, and newcomer perspectives on addressing child and youth mental health.

 

Research and Knowledge Exchange 

ACTION 1: Bridge Western and Indigenous knowledge through two-eyed seeing; honour, respect, value, make space for other ways of knowing; need practical understanding of two-eyed seeing

ACTION 2: Value narratives and stories as evidence, being open to what constitutes knowledge and evidence and what gets privileged in certain contexts

ACTION 3: Work alongside children and youth as experts of their own lives.

ACTION 4: Develop and promote multi sectoral indicators of mental health and its determinants.

ACTION 5: Use common indicators to measure short term and long term collective impact.

ACTION 6: Create and report on common indicators for child and youth mental health and frame outcomes within a rights-based approach.

ACTION 7: Create interdepartmental and inter-jurisdictional agreements to share data and indicators that illustrate factors that contribute to mental health.

ACTION 8: Increase support for diverse research methodologies, including community-based and participatory action research.

ACTION 9: Promote economic literacy for people to better understand macro-economic, structural issues that impact mental health.

ACTION 10: Create a clearinghouse and a sustained infrastructure and funding to maintain the sharing of data and knowledge in the Atlantic region and beyond. Work with other models and existing networks.

ACTION 11: Educate the public about child and youth mental health promotion and illness prevention and the long-term benefits to communities and society.

ACTION 12: Improve data collection and sharing across jurisdictions by enhancing training, increasing funding, building infrastructure in adherence to national and global standards.

ACTION 13: Improve public reporting on child and youth mental health indicators, including positive mental health indicators, on a regular basis.

ACTION 14: Enhance partnerships between academia, communities, and the public sector to strengthen data collection, research, and data sharing.

ACTION 15: Read and support Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, articles #57, #62, and #66.

ACTION 16: Assess what information has been collected with regards to whole of society approaches child and youth mental health over the past 5 years, and share programs, frameworks, initiatives, and ideas with the Atlantic Provinces to better distribute the usage of time and resources.

ACTION 17: Look for intersectoral examples and frameworks that converge with the Call to Action, and how it can support its implementation, such as a framework piloted with the Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and Environment.

ACTION 18: Equip parents with the appropriate tools for responding to their children’s’ mental health needs, for instance through Mental Health First Aid.

 

Networks

ACTION 1: Introduce yourself to someone you don’t know in another sector that can contribute to your work.

ACTION 2: Seek opportunities through networks activities to advance a shared agenda.

ACTION 3: Use network mapping tools to understand and expand your network, and follow through with opportunities.

ACTION 4: Enhance dialogue on child and youth mental health by engaging parents, youth, Indigenous elders, policy makers at all levels of government, service providers, faith-based organizations, people and sectors outside the areas of mental health (e.g. housing), and other stakeholders, including through interprovincial collaboration.

ACTION 5: Engage media in the discussion on child and youth mental health.

ACTION 6: Seek out strong leadership, educate communities, and identify where and how to harness intersectoral work.

 

 

APPENDIX 1 – CONTEXT

First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework (2015) was developed through collaboration between the Assembly of First Nations, Health Canada’s First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, the National Native Addictions Partnership Foundation, the Native Mental Health Association, and other community mental health leaders.  The Framework identifies ways to improve service delivery to First Nations and provide culturally-safe supports. We can learn from First Nations and use this framework for working together to promote child and youth mental health for all Canadians. Key themes from this framework woven into the ASI program are: leadership, cultural ways of knowing, resilience, strengths-based, across the life span.

Mental Health Summit: Mental Health Promotion and Mental Illness Prevention for All (2012) led by Healthy Child Manitoba, the summit drew more than 300 delegates from across the country, including service delivery, policy and research, as well as representatives from provincial, territorial, Indigenous, federal governments, and national organisations. The post-summit report proposes a blueprint for a “pan-Canadian framework for the collaboration, implementation, scale up and sustained commitment to evidence-based mental health promotion and mental illness prevention.” Key concepts and themes from this report woven into the ASI program are; life course approach, collective impact, evidence-based implementation, and equity.

Mental Health Summit Follow-up: Think Tank Proceedings Report (2013).  Public Health Agency of Canada, Mental Health Commission of Canada, Manitoba Mental Health and Spiritual Health Care, and Healthy Child Manitoba. The goal of the Think Tank was to identify and recommend those mechanisms which not only facilitate the exchange (communication) of evidence among and between jurisdictions, but which also provide support for the development and scale up (“the how”) of MHP-MIP innovation and best practices within and across respective Canadian jurisdictions. It provides a blueprint for successful scale-up of effective mental health promotion-mental illness prevention innovations and best practices.

Maximizing Social Impacts and Returns on Investment: Towards a Sustainable Prevention Infrastructure for Population Mental Health Promotion and Mental Illness Prevention in Canada (2014). Mental Health Summit Network. Provides a pan-Canadian framework for the collaboration, implementation, scale-up, and sustained commitment to evidence-based mental health promotion and mental illness prevention.

Population Mental Health Promotion for Children and Youth – Topical Papers and Resources (2017) was published by the National Collaborating Centres for Public Health (NCCPH). This project addresses a need for resources to help clarify terms, concepts, roles and responsibilities related to population mental health promotion.  Key concepts from this series woven into the ASI program are: life course approach, health equity, indigeneity and diversity, population health promotion.

Positive Mental Health Toolkit, 2nd Ed. (2016), developed by the Pan-Canadian Joint Consortium for School Health, is comprised of five online modules that have been updated to reflect recent Canadian research, and to identify promising practices occurring in diverse contexts across the country.  The PMH Toolkit also provides a means of measuring positive mental health practices.  Key concepts from this toolkit woven into the ASI program are: strengths-based approach, social and emotional learning, resilience, connectedness.

The SEAK (Social and Emotional Learning for Kids) Project, funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), has created a vision document that represents the input of a cross-section of leaders, decision-makers, and practitioners who share a commitment to social and emotional learning (SEL) programs across Atlantic Canada.  Building on the PHAC Innovation Strategy’s program design, the document offers a detailed strategy for inter-provincial collaboration to scale up SEL programs in Atlantic Canada. Key themes from this report woven into the ASI program are: leadership, scale up, whole school approach, strengths-based, equity, partnerships, teaching and learning.

Positive Population Mental Health Surveillance Indicator Framework for Youth (2017), produced by PHAC, provides a comprehensive national framework captures high quality information about risk and protective factors affecting mental health outcomes for youth (12-17 years) across four related domains.  The 26-indicator framework was developed in consultation with stakeholders working in mental health surveillance, programs and policy. It will continue to evolve as new data becomes available.

State of the Child Report 2016 – New Brunswick: The eighth annual report is the undertaking of the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate.  It contains more than 200 data indicators, based on a child rights and well-being framework.  The 2016 report focuses on children’s mental health.  It is notable for its comprehensive look at factors that build resilience, while also examining persistent gaps and risk factors for positive mental health in children.  It is a strong example of a good practice.

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