Mindset Revolution: Changing minds on youth mental health policy and practice through revolutionising the way we do youth participation

by The Mindset Revolution Team

The Optimistic Minds’ actors. Pictures by Ingrid Turner.

“Je participe, Tu participes, Ils profitent”[1] recites a famous French student poster from May 1968. The rhetoric on citizens participation has since become more sophisticated, but despite much work designing and testing new forms of public engagement and public dialogue(External link) over the past three decades, the space for democracy seems to have actually shrunk. Our democracies are constrained by a neoliberal ideology that prioritises healthy markets over healthy people and sacrifices the wellbeing of the planet for the wellbeing of shareholders. There is an epidemic of mental illness, as we all feel crippled by multiple urgent crises that our representatives are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to address. From the climate crisis to the energy crisis and the cost of living, to the crisis of public services starved of resources as they cope with growing demand, to the crisis of democracy itself(External link) – society is unwell and young people are the worst affected. Their voice too often goes unheard or ignored by institutional centres of power.

Emotional disorders among young people, particularly anxiety and depression, are on the rise(External link). The pandemic has exacerbated these problems, but young people are also more likely to have poor mental health if they live in poverty(External link), if they have parents with poor mental health, and if they experience racism and discrimination (for instance if they identify as LGBTQ+(External link)). A third of people in the youth justice system(External link) are estimated to have a mental health condition. To have better mental health we need more equal, more caring, more democratic societies.

The revolution will be televised (on multiple channels!)

Mindset Revolution are a group of researchers, practitioners, community organisations and diverse young people working across Greater Manchester. We want to transform the way society understands and addresses youth mental health by opening space for young people to find their collective voice and influence change. We want to reframe the problems and the solutions from the unique perspectives of diverse groups of young people. We do this by moving away from a model of public dialogue as one-off events organised by an external agency that defines the agenda and selects participants, maybe overlooking or sidelining what the local community and civil society are already doing. For us participation is not a one-night stand, but rather an ongoing process across multiple and overlapping sites of participation. It is grounded in the local community, co-designed with participants - in this case young people - and with the ambition of becoming sustainable beyond the lifetime of a single initiative, continuously opening up space for, and feeding into, existing and new projects.

There is a growing body of evidence(External link) that participatory processes produce sensible and innovative recommendations. However, policymakers tend to cherry pick(External link) those which fit their own agenda; the rest are mostly quickly shelved, either because of a lack of capacity to implement them(External link) or because different policy agendas take priority. We want more meaningful democracy, and for that to happen we need to anchor our work in communities with a stake in specific policy areas, and build enough public support to put pressure on policymakers to be accountable.

By relying on talk-centric participation, many engagement processes can be exclusive and exacerbate the inequalities of power and resources of the outside world. Instead, we experiment with different forms of participation, using arts-based and creative methods, digital and in person, to build a participatory ecology where young people can participate in different ways towards the same cause.

Unleashing a youth movement for change on mental health

Our journey began a few months ago, when we came together for the project Optimistic Minds(External link), funded by Emerging Minds(External link). A group of diverse young people, supported by Katy Rubin(External link), created a play to convey their experience of navigating an unresponsive mental health system. They used Legislative Theatre(External link), an established participatory approach for creative, community-led policy change. Legislative Theatre gamifies the policy process, while sensitively naming structural racism, sexism, ageism, classism, and ableism as forces in institutional practice. The audience play an active part as spect-actors, engaging with the play to co-develop solutions. A team of policymakers and professionals is invited to the performance and works with the audience and the actors to make commitments and help enact real change.

As a team, we felt galvanised by this work, the interaction with diverse audiences and their engaged response, the commitments already made by several organisations and services. It made us feel we had finally found our voice – and it was loud and clear. We wanted to build on this work and keep the momentum, reaching out to more young people and ensuring change really happened, opening the way to more youth-led transformation. You can read about the policy actions already agreed here(External link).

With new funding from UKRI and the RSA, the next steps are to foster a youth-led participatory ecology on youth mental health in Greater Manchester, aiming to keep track of progress through participatory scrutiny, raise awareness with more services and the public to build support, and build new skills and capacity among young people in Greater Manchester. We see all this work as the first step in a process towards youth-led sustainable and embedded participation. In this new phase we:

• Provide training to the actors from Optimistic Minds to become Legislative Theatre facilitators (also called jokers(External link)). They will then lead on creating a new play themselves, engaging other young people;

•  Involve new diverse groups of 16-25 year olds and support them to co-design and deliver online participation reaching out to their peers, professionals and policymakers. We will use the Decidim(External link) platform with support from the Platoniq(External link) Foundation[2];

•  Mobilise knowledge on youth mental health research, policy and practice to co-produce resources with young people for young people, which will inform the Legislative Theatre play and will be shared on Decidim;

• Link all this work to our partners’ projects and events on youth mental health to strengthen impact and monitor progress on existing and future recommendations from young people. In particular our partner YFNW will make sure our work also feeds into the agenda of the Greater Manchester Youth Combined Authority(External link), which is our bridge to local government institutions.

We are working with young co-researchers to evaluate how this youth-led and embedded approach across multiple and overlapping sites of participation works for them and their peers, as well as policymakers.

Democracy is relational; it’s about knowing we have a voice and genuine agency on our lives, but it is also about feeling solidarity and a sense of belonging. We want to rebuild democracy from the bottom up to help each other respond to a world in crisis and transform it into a caring world.

The Mindset Revolution Team

Sonia Bussu, James Duggan, Zarah Eve, Katy Rubin, Youth Focus North West, Platoniq, Reform Radio, 42nd Street, GM-iThrive, and all the young people leading on this process: Ali, Bolu, Charlie, Chimwemwe, Dan, Juliet, Lee, Linton, Mahdiyyah, MJ, Oscar, Peace, Prateek, Saira, Ummay, Zainab, Zara.

[1] “I participate, you participate, they profit.”

[2] Platoniq Foundation designs digital participatory processes and facilitates innovative participatory methodologies to help build more democratic and just societies and organisations, making use of open civic technologies.