Mr Christopher Wainwright1
1Griffith University / Batyr, Australia
Biography:
Chris Wainwright is a PhD student at Griffith University, with a concentration on youth mental health and empowerment. He is overseeing a research collaboration between Griffith and Batyr, exploring the outcomes of a youth mental health advocacy program upon participant professional development and social wellbeing. He has worked in the youth field for over 15 years, as a coach, mentor, teacher, facilitator and advocate, and holds extended certification in working with young people with special educational needs and mental health challenges.
Abstract:
Youth mental health remains a pertinent topic of social significance, but clinical services are found have high barriers to entry or are developmentally inappropriate in treating all cases of youth mental ill-health. Lived experience advocacy peer support programmes offer a viable supplementary or alternative option in addressing this issue. Whilst much has been written about the impacts of such programmes on participants, and reviews have been presented about the impacts upon lived experience advocates working in clinical settings, research regarding those working at a community level remains scattered. To synthesise current evidence in the field a scoping review was undertaken. Five databases were searched including MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, ProQuest and PsycINFO which returned 4,785 articles. After screening articles for relevance, 30 studies were included in this review paper, incorporating a range of countries and study types. Our findings suggest that such programmes could offer valuable benefits to advocates in terms of foundational, emotional, spiritual, social and occupational wellness, furthering young people’s personal recovery from mental ill-health. The scoping review makes valuable contributions in understanding the effectiveness of peer support community advocacy programmes and is of particular interest to those involved in the recruitment, training and support of youth lived experience advocates. The review also identified important gaps in the current body of work; namely surrounding training practices, frameworks informing community-based LEA operations, and quantification of impacts generated through advocacy, and calls for further research in this space