Grant: Prize - IHDCYH Talks

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health problem in youth. Although there is a growing amount of research focusing on anxiety in children and adolescents, this research often fails to include the experiences of youth living with anxiety, including their thoughts, perceptions and feelings, and perspectives. With that in mind, Dr. Roberta Woodgate and her team at the College of Nursing, University of Manitoba, undertook a Canadian Institutes of Health Research-funded project entitled "Youth Voices: Their Lives and Experiences of Living with an Anxiety Disorder." The project involved 58 youth (10-22 years) and their parents sharing their experiences through in-depth interviews. Youth also took part in photovoice, a process that involved youth taking photographs to document their experiences. Photovoice was a powerful tool for amplifying the voices of youth in the study and helped bring creative insights to the research. Woodgate and her team reviewed the interviews and the photographs created by the youth and identified key metaphors that youth used to represent what it is like to live anxiety. Working with Wookey Films, she created a 5-part video series that is based entirely on the metaphors used by youth to describe their experiences of anxiety. Each video features the unedited words of youth from the research interviews and animations inspired by their ideas and photographs. The video featured for this video competition includes the 'monster' metaphor reinforcing the frightening nature of anxiety and the 'fighting to stay on the path' metaphor showing how youth fight to deal with their anxiety. This video series is not only compelling and thought-provoking, but is a powerful way to establish a connection between youth and the audience. Using a creative approach to share the metaphors promotes an understanding of what it is like to be a youth living with anxiety and help others see the very real impact that anxiety can have on the lives of young people.