Grant: Project Grant

With looming threats related to a rapidly changing economic landscape, along with individual, family, and pandemic stressors, Alberta can be a challenging place for youth to thrive. Thriving is particularly difficult in emerging adolescence, a period marked by significant biological and contextual change. Stress, disruptions, and change are predictors of mental distress, and research shows that youth depression and anxiety has doubled during the pandemic. Thus, it is critical to follow a current group of youth to determine if the observed pandemic increases in depression and anxiety still remain in the aftermath of the pandemic. To inform policy action, resource allocation, and mental health recovery efforts, it is also important to compare youth self-reports of depression and anxiety with their help-seeking behavior, service utilization, and prevalence of clinical diagnoses. Our study will provide this information. The All Our Families study is a pregnancy cohort in Calgary, Alberta that started in 2008 and has followed families over time. At the outset of the pandemic, when youth were age 10, we launched the Youth in All our Families Cohort to hear directly from youth about their experiences and well-being over the course of the pandemic. We now seek funding to continue to follow these youth into their adolescent years when they are ages 15 and 17. We will link cohort survey data to administrative mental health data (e.g., physician visits for mental health, emergency department visits, prescriptions) to identify the patterns of diagnoses and help-seeking behavior in the context of changing patterns of youth depression and anxiety. We also will identify the patterns of risk and protective factors related to youth depression and anxiety. Results emerging from this project can powerfully inform decision-making on resource allocation and prevention and intervention strategies to optimize youth mental health.