Updates

Social supports may be universally beneficial for adolescents, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Adolescence.

Written by researchers including Kim Thomson, an assistant professor of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and a CHPC team member, the paper tracked the emotional health of immigrant, refugee and non-immigrant early adolescents in British Columbia.

The study found that immigrant and refugee adolescents across 10 school districts started Grade 4 with poorer emotional health than their peers, highlighting the need for culturally responsive supports for these students. From Grades 4 to 7, both immigrant and non-immigrant adolescents experienced a decline in their emotional health.

However, first-generation refugees were a notable exception — they reported feeling more satisfied with life over the same time.

Despite the differences in emotional health between the groups, Thomson and her co-authors “did not find differences in the associations between improvements in emotional health and improvements in social support by immigration group.” This indicates that social supports may benefit all adolescents regardless of their immigration backgrounds.

“These results highlight social support as a modifiable factor within schools that can promote young people’s emotional health,” the study concluded.

To learn more, read the full paper.

A prevention program for Grade 7 students could help end the opioid crisis, according to a recent article by the team from the Children’s Health Policy Centre.

Published in The Conversation, the article is based on research findings about school-based primary prevention interventions over the last 20 years.

“Many of Canada’s responses to the opioid crisis still focus downstream on adults, after problems have started or become entrenched,” the article said. “In contrast, primary prevention operates upstream in childhood — before most young people start engaging in substance use, misuse or experimentation.”

The two most promising school-based programs are: Strengthening Families and Project PATHS, and they have been tested in the US and Hong Kong. Both led to significant reductions in opioid use by young people, including over long-term follow-up.

The two programs have another feature adding to their appeal for delivery in Canada, according to the authors. Training for facilitators is very brief — only two days for Strengthening Families and three days for Project PATHS.

“The short training time also helps reduce delivery costs, further increasing the appeal for policy-makers and school administrators,” the article said.

In concluding, the authors noted that the federal government has committed more than a billion dollars since 2017 to address the toxic drug problem — paralleled by provincial and territorial funding. “But a policy shift towards meaningful prevention also requires tackling the realities of current Canadian health spending priorities,” they said.

“Only 6.1% of health spending in 2023 went towards public health including prevention, a longstanding pattern. So concerted, coordinated and collaborative efforts are needed within and across every policy level and jurisdiction.”

So new prevention efforts are badly needed to tackle the opioid crisis in Canada — thereby ensuring that many more children do not go on to experience avoidable harms.

Read the full article here.

Transgender and nonbinary children and youth often face significant challenges compared to their cisgender peers. Many experience peer victimization, and trans teens also face verbal harassment in many Canadian schools. These adverse experiences also extend into the home, where trans and nonbinary youth may face emotional neglect or abuse by a parent or other adult.

These experiences cause significant harm, and they also place trans and nonbinary youth at risk for secondary mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety.

Knowing how many transgender and nonbinary youth are dealing with these disorders is critical to inform prevention and treatment efforts. A recent report by the Children’s Health Policy Centre, funded by the BC Ministry of Health, investigated the prevalence of mental health concerns for trans and nonbinary young people.

The report identified:

• The overall prevalence of mental disorders in transgender and nonbinary youth, which is 56.6% This makes it between 5.9 and 13 times higher than their cisgender counterparts.
• Significant rates of self harm or suicidal ideation among transgender and nonbinary youth, with prevalence up to five times higher than in their cisgender peers.
• A need for easily accessible and effective mental health treatments for these children and youth.
• The importance of addressing the unacceptable and preventable adverse experiences that many transgender and nonbinary young people face and that can contribute to the development of mental health conditions.

These findings can inform efforts to improve mental health service planning, delivery and equity for transgender and nonbinary children and youth in British Columbia.

To learn more, read the report and review the findings.

In the historic halls of the BC provincial legislature, Kimberly Thomson discovered how much government runs on relationships.

The Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and member of the Children’s Health Policy Centre was attending a two-day session at the legislature as part of a Science Meets Parliament event in April.

With the goal of improving conversation between policymakers and scientists, the Science Meets Parliament organizers had arranged for Thomson and the other delegates, including several members of SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences, to meet with MLAs and government staff.

As part of the experience, all delegates met with Raj Chouhan, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, and with Lieutenant Governor Janet Austin. Thomson also met with BC Green Party representatives, including Party Leader Sonia Furstenau, and with NDP MLA Dan Coulter, the Minister of State for Infrastructure and Transit. Despite working in different fields, Thomson and the MLAs she met with discovered several points of connection, including shared interests in child rights, diversity and inclusion, and youth justice. These conversations helped Thomson better understand how policymakers set their agendas.

“It was really beneficial to spend the day immersed in their world and understand what their priorities are, the considerations that they are juggling when making different policies,” Thomson said.

“Research is important for policy making, but it’s only one part. Your researcher brain says that if you just construct the best possible evidence and present it to them, they’ll make the decision based on that. But that’s not entirely how it works. At the end of the day, policymakers want to make the best decisions for people living in BC and there are a number of factors to consider.”

For Thomson, this experience also highlighted the importance of the work the Children’s Health Policy Centre does to share its research with policymakers.

“Building connections with policymakers allows you to be part of their process so they might call on you for advice,” she said. “This experience made me respect and appreciate the time and effort that goes into building these relationships and how special it is that the Centre has these relationships.”

Thomson spent the rest of the program attending Question Period, listening to panel discussions with legislators, and networking with the 30 other Science Meets Parliament delegates from universities across BC. She left the legislature with several new connections and a stronger sense of how she could support policy decisions through her work.

“I would absolutely recommend it [Science Meets Parliament] to other researchers,” Thomson said. “This was an invaluable experience to better understand the roles and responsibilities of policy makers, their priorities, and how science can best support decision-making.”

Science Meets Parliament is hosted by the Canadian Science Policy Centre, a non-profit organization dedicated to building a strong and inclusive science policy community in Canada. Since 2018, the annual event has brought emerging science leaders to Parliament Hill in an effort to strengthen the connection between Canada’s scientific and political communities. The Science Meets Parliament BC program was the event’s first expansion into a provincial legislature.