Protective or Resilience Factors to Promote Mental Health among Indigenous Youth in Canada: A Scoping Review Protocol
Introduction: Many mental health disorders have their onset in adolescence and young adulthood, making this a critical period to initiate early interventions for mental health promotion and illness prevention. In particular, indigenous young people in Canada are at a higher risk of mental health outcomes and faced with limited access to appropriate care and resources. Fortunately, protective factors can positively modify a person’s response to external and environmental stressors that result in maladaptive outcomes. Among Indigenous peoples, resilience is considered a healing process, and cultural interventions for mental health promotion show particular promise. As such, there is a need for innovative mental health interventions for Indigenous youth that transcend the Western biomedical model, use a strengths-based approach, and account for the cultural practices and belief systems of Indigenous peoples. In response, this scoping review aims to explore the resilience and/or protective factors that promote mental health for Indigenous youth in Canada. The findings from this scoping review will identify different levels of resilience and/or protective factors that can be used to design interventions for this population Methods and Analysis: The review will follow Joanna Briggs Institute guidance and Arksey and O’Malley framework for conducting scoping reviews. The reporting will follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist and guidelines. We will include both published and unpublished grey literature and search the following databases: PubMed, Cumulative Index of Nursing Allied Health Literature, Education Resources Information Center and Embase. Further, we will use government and relevant Indigenous organization websites. Two reviewers will independently screen the articles and extract the data. Ethics and Dissemination: No ethical approval is required for this study. We will share the results through conference presentations and an open-access publication in a peer-reviewed journal.