Gillian’s previous policy work influenced the development of her research program

Transcript

Okay, so what motivated me to, I guess to, get involved in partnership research was my experience when I worked at the Mental Health Commission of Canada. So I was working on the mental health strategy and one of the tasks in developing a strategy for the country was to talk to people across the country. So we held stakeholder consultations, we interfaced with a number of advisory committees, each of which had different lenses on the question of what do we need to do to improve mental health policy in Canada?

And I think that experience was really powerful in making me realize the importance of everyone’s voices. So that could be the person with lived experience, the patient, the family member, service providers and capturing the diversity of ages so whether it was youth mental health or senior’s mental health or different cultural groups, First Nations and Métis mental health and so on and that looking at workplaces and the legal system, that all of these different dimensions had to be incorporated if we were going to be come up with solutions that worked for people. And so when I came to and started my research program here, I think that experience really shaped my approach to research. 

And the other thing that happened in that experience was an exposure to the concept of a recovery orientation. And in mental health that’s really about allowing people to recover, which may or may not be the same thing as be cured, but recover a meaningful life. And a big part of that was empowering people to seek out the sets of services that they need and to be very involved in designing services so that that lived experience component was really, really important. 

So when I came to [name]as a professor my question was how do we do that in practice? How do we make that real? And one approach that I came across in literature was experienced based co-design and where, you know, people are working together, that’s the co-design part from multiple perspectives. In this case, in the work I do, I focus on the youth mental health population, so it’s be youth family members or other caregivers chosen by the youth, whoever the youth chooses, and service providers working together that’s the co-design piece, but based on experience so their own lived experiences and the experiences from all three groups. 

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