CAMH partners with Healthy Debate to support youth with lived experience to promote change

By Shona Douse, Communications Assistant

CAMH and Healthy Debate have launched a new partnership with the creation of the site, Our Voice Matters. It features the stories of four CAMH Youth Advisors using their voices to make mental health care more effective and youth-friendly. 

The four youth featured on the site are members of CAMH’s Youth Engagement Initiative based out of Margaret and Wallace McCain Centre for Child, Youth & Family Mental Health. The goal of this program is to facilitate collaboration between youth with lived experience of mental health and/or substance use with decision-makers at CAMH. 

On the site, the youth share their stories and experiences with mental illness and the mental health system. As a result of their experiences, they have become advocates for youth engagement in the system, knowing that youth voices can create programs and services that are helpful for other young people. “All we want is for projects to be accessible for other youth, says Chloe Camacho, CAMH Youth Advisor. “Using our voice to help other youth empowers us.” 

The youth say that they are uniquely positioned to give advice about the services they receive. “No one knows what’s going on in a community as well as the people who belong,” says Mahalia Dixon, CAMH Youth Advisor. “When young people aren’t involved in the creation of services, then they are not going to be services that they need. Youth need to be the leaders of any ship that is being driven.”

Dr. Seema Marwaha, physician and editor in chief of Healthy Debate agrees. “Their voice, the voice of lived experience is really important in deciding effective care and understanding the system,” she says.

Ultimately, they have some advice for policy-makers and clinicians: “There is a sentence that we often use in the Youth Engagement Initiative and I really believe it, it’s ‘nothing about us without us.’ You should really think about this (when designing programs) and then do it,” says Em Hayes, CAMH Youth Advisor. 

Related to this kind of work, CAMH’s Provincial System Support Program (PSSP) recently produced a report called Fostering Meaningful Engagement of Persons with Lived Experience at the System Level, which further highlights the need for engaging people with lived experiences with mental health at the highest level of decision-making in order to create and promote change in organizations and programs. 

To see and read the stories of the four CAMH youth advisors and their work to make system change, visit ourvoicematters net.