Fractured minds to flourishing minds

<p>Youth suicide and self-harm are major public health concerns worldwide. The high rate of youth suicide and intentional self-harm in New Zealand, illustrates that there is a large amount of youth experiencing severe mental illness, as mental illness corresponds to suicidal/harmful behavior. Although more youth are seeking and receiving help, a large portion who are suffering are unwilling to engage in services, due to stigma surrounding mental health. Characteristics of the built environment can effect wellbeing and therefore architecture holds significant implications for the mental health of individuals. Inpatient environments are an effective intervention for the treatment of a range of severe mental illnesses, however there is a definitive lack of acute inpatient facilities for youth in New Zealand. A shift in the way mental healthcare services are provided has meant that large psychiatric hospitals have been closed or downsized and compulsory inpatient treatment has given way to voluntary engagement with community mental health services. This has not eliminated the need for inpatient care and there still remains a need for these highly specialized environments. These current specialized environments are generally not designed to benefit the mental health and wellbeing of patients, but are just regarded as settings in which recovery takes place. This thesis aims to explore how architecture can act therapeutically to support the wellbeing of individuals suffering mental illness. It looks at how architecture can retain the dignity of these patients, and challenge conventional norms of prior mental healthcare environments. This thesis aims to integrate Maori and Pacific models of health and wellbeing in order to allow improved care and treatment for Maori and Pacific groups. It responds to the lack and unsuccessful architectural responses for youth in New Zealand and in particular, the central region and aims to design a new mental health inpatient and outpatient facility specifically for youth suffering mental illness.</p>

Fractured minds to flourishing minds

<p>Youth suicide and self-harm are major public health concerns worldwide. The high rate of youth suicide and intentional self-harm in New Zealand, illustrates that there is a large amount of youth experiencing severe mental illness, as mental illness corresponds to suicidal/harmful behavior. Although more youth are seeking and receiving help, a large portion who are suffering are unwilling to engage in services, due to stigma surrounding mental health. Characteristics of the built environment can effect wellbeing and therefore architecture holds significant implications for the mental health of individuals. Inpatient environments are an effective intervention for the treatment of a range of severe mental illnesses, however there is a definitive lack of acute inpatient facilities for youth in New Zealand. A shift in the way mental healthcare services are provided has meant that large psychiatric hospitals have been closed or downsized and compulsory inpatient treatment has given way to voluntary engagement with community mental health services. This has not eliminated the need for inpatient care and there still remains a need for these highly specialized environments. These current specialized environments are generally not designed to benefit the mental health and wellbeing of patients, but are just regarded as settings in which recovery takes place. This thesis aims to explore how architecture can act therapeutically to support the wellbeing of individuals suffering mental illness. It looks at how architecture can retain the dignity of these patients, and challenge conventional norms of prior mental healthcare environments. This thesis aims to integrate Maori and Pacific models of health and wellbeing in order to allow improved care and treatment for Maori and Pacific groups. It responds to the lack and unsuccessful architectural responses for youth in New Zealand and in particular, the central region and aims to design a new mental health inpatient and outpatient facility specifically for youth suffering mental illness.</p>

Peer support for youth suicide prevention: a scoping review protocol

IntroductionYouth suicide is a significant public health priority, and is the second leading cause of death among young people between 15 and 29 years of age. An emerging intervention in suicide prevention programming with youth is peer support. Although increasingly used in other settings, the evidence for peer support interventions in youth suicide prevention remains nascent. This article presents a protocol for a scoping review aimed at systematically mapping the current evidence on peer support for youth suicide prevention.Methods and analysisArksey and O’Malley’s scoping review framework will guide the review methods. The search strategy will be developed with guidance from a health sciences librarian. Multiple databases (Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, Cumulative Index for Nursing and Allied Health Literature) and grey literature will be identified using terms related to peer support and youth suicide prevention. Publication date restrictions will not be applied. All identified records of published literature will be collated and uploaded to a systematic review management software, Covidence, for review and selection. Screening will be completed in duplicate by two reviewers using predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Conflicts during screening will be resolved by a third reviewer. The title and abstract screening and full-text review will be completed in Covidence. Two reviewers will complete data extraction from the selected records, using a tailored extraction form. Screening and data extraction will be completed between January and April 2021. A narrative summary will be completed to synthesise key findings as well as contextual information about the use of peer support interventions in youth suicide prevention programming.Ethics and disseminationThe results will be disseminated through a community research report, presentations of findings at relevant conferences and academic publications of the scoping review protocol and results. The data used for this scoping review will be derived from published resources; therefore, ethics approval is not required for this study.

The ethics of facing the Other in suicide

Despite a plethora of existing literature on the topic of suicide, very little attention has been given to research ethics in practice in research on suicide. When suicide research does pay attention to the ethical issues researchers are likely to face, the focus is on the roles institutional human ethics review committees fulfil to ensure ethical conduct in all stages of research. In response to this problem, this article focuses on the philosophical relationship between qualitative methodology and research ethics in the context of researching queer youth suicide. In so doing, I draw on my experiences of interviewing gender-and sexually diverse young people about their familiarity with suicide. These experiences are based on a qualitative pilot study I conducted on queer youth suicide, which used the unstructured interview technique to collect data. Drawing on the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler, I examine what it means to face the alterity of the suicidal ‘Other’, and what this facing entails in terms of research ethics as relational. I argue that facing reveals not only myself as more vulnerable than I anticipated, but also the suicidal ‘Other’ as agentic instead of only vulnerable and at-risk of suicide.

What are the characteristics of arguments that precede youth suicide?

Researchers at Kent State University, USA have studied the characteristics of conflicts or arguments before death by suicide in young people aged 17 years or younger.