Research project Mental illness is a leading cause of health-related burden for young people and impacts other health and development outcomes
Mental illness is contributed to by adversity yet psycho-social assets in young people can be strengthened to moderate the impacts of adversity. This projects’ overall purpose is to adapt and implement an intervention to strengthen resilience and mental health for disadvantaged young people in urban North India using theory driven evaluation to guide the process. In 2016 this team evaluated an intervention to build youth resilience as promising. We believe it can become more acceptable, effective, and sustainable by adding components that address family environments and the different needs of young men. The key steps to the research activities in this collaboration are: 1 (Months 0 – 15) Eliciting the programme theory with the community and research team; 2 (Months 16 – 24) Testing the programme theory by implementing the adapted intervention among disadvantaged 12 – 16-year-olds in urban North India using qualitative (in-depth interviews, focus group discussions) and quantitative data (psycho-metric scales) to assess resilience outcomes; 3 (Months 0 -36) Identify how, why, for whom and under what circumstances the intervention works; The collaboration will facilitate a long-term partnership. The EHA team in India will contribute expertise in implementing community mental health programmes while members from Umea and Melbourne will contribute their expertise in theory-driven evaluation. The collaboration will be supported by joint field work, workshops and study visits.
