Project title: Racial inequalities in mental health help-seeking among young people in the COVID-19 context.
Project aims and overview:
Black and other racialised communities in the UK are at increased risk of severe mental illness and are disproportionately detained involuntarily under the Mental Health Act. They are also less likely to receive and to seek support for their mental health. Adolescence is the period in which most mental health problems first emerge, so early support and intervention for those experiencing mental distress in adolescence may help prevent longer term problems. We know very little, though, about mental health help-seeking patterns among Black adolescents, and we know even less about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on racial inequalities in help-seeking. This is important because we do know that Black (and other racialised) groups, particularly those in poverty, have been disproportionately impacted by the social, economic, and health consequences of the pandemic. Understanding and dismantling barriers to mental health help-seeking among Black adolescents in the context of COVID-19, then, is a public health priority, but we lack high quality evidence on this topic.
The proposed project will address this knowledge gap. Working together with Black adolescents and with schools, this project – embedded within our ongoing cohort study of adolescent mental health in diverse urban areas, REACH – will generate new information about:
- the extent and nature of mental health help-seeking among adolescents from Black and minority ethnic groups before and during the COVID-19 pandemic,
- whether racial inequalities in mental health help-seeking have widened during the pandemic and, if so, whether any impacts persist over time, and
- what needs to change to reduce these inequalities.
To achieve this, the successful candidate will be invited to:
- analyse six waves of existing help-seeking data from REACH (3 pre-pandemic and 3 mid-pandemic time points),
- conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups with Black secondary school students to understand barriers and facilitators to help seeking, and
- co-develop and pilot a culturally sensitive toolkit for schools, designed to improve understanding of and dismantle barriers to in-school mental health support for Black pupils and informed by findings from the first two stages of the project.
The successful candidate will be strongly encouraged to co-produce all stages of this research with Black adolescents and with our partner schools and to ensure the findings and outputs from this work are accessible to and shared widely with young people.