School`s out with fever: service provider perspectives of youth with mental health struggles

Abstract

Youth struggling with mental health issues is a major concern in Norway and other Western countries. As is the increasing rate of youth unemployment combined with high rates of disengagement from education. Rather than receiving support to complete their education or find work, they are often given a psychiatric diagnosis that may camouflage the social nature of their problems. Therefore, a multidisciplinary approach to meeting the needs of the population is called for. Through qualitative and dialogical methods, this study explores how service providers on an outreach team understand why youth are in need of care and what is considered quality care. The article raises issues about the difficulties of youth in an essential societal arena as school. The findings contributes to knowledge on how to develop a collaborative practice in a field of tensions between contradictory policies that require recovery-oriented practice within a discourse of pathologizing youth troubling.

Keywords

• mental health
• youth
• dialogue
• outreach team
• quality care