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As the new holder of the Sun Life Chair in Youth Mental Health at ����91��Ƶ University, Wozney will spend the next five years working with clinicians and youth with lived experience to discover what mental health programs and supports best meet their needs.

She and her team will also translate her research findings for clinicians, communities, and policymakers, to improve services—and outcomes—for youth.

“One of the challenges right now is the need is so high, in terms of the numbers of youth who are feeling distressed and overwhelmed and trying to access care,” says Wozney, who stepped into her new role on October 15.

Across Canada, for example, 4.75 million youth contacted the Kids Help Line seeking assistance in 2023—a dramatic increase from the 1.9 million youth who reached out in 2019, before the pandemic.

Even before the pandemic, children and youth in Nova Scotia were struggling with mental wellness. A third of children and youth under 19 reported feeling sad and hopeless every day for two weeks or more, to such an extent it affected their daily activities, according to One Chance to Be a Child, a 2022 report by .

Close to a third of children and youth in the province—31 percent—reported feeling low or depressed for a week or more.

In 2001, the Reaching Out Committee, a group of concerned community members who had been personally affected, met with ����91��Ƶ representatives to establish the Chair. Their goal was to advance research pertaining to youth mental health and mental illness, and to improve outcomes for youth in the region.

, which has been investing in youth mental health programs and community-led programs to support at-risk and marginalized communities across the country for decades, joined the efforts as the lead partner.

The first chairholder, , held the position for 10 years and had significant impact on mental health literacy in schools.

Having youth with lived experience co-lead research projects to determine where they feel safest seeking help, what kind of resources they need, and how best to leverage technology is critical to designing successful evidence-based programs, Wozney believes.

Stacie Smith is one of those young people who joined one of Wozney’s research projects, which concerned the role of goal-setting in mental health. Smith graduated from ����91��Ƶ in 2020 with her undergraduate degree in Kinesiology and is now a master’s student in curriculum studies at Mount Saint Vincent University.

In her mid-20s, she reached out for help to the provincial helpline after being diagnosed with major depressive disorder. But the intake worker she spoke with denied her request for individual therapy through the public health-care system.

“By the end of a very lengthy intake call, I was told I wasn’t eligible for one-on-one counselling,” Smith remembers. “They didn’t tell me why.”

Youth need integrated services

Instead, the intake provider offered Smith group therapy—not an option the young woman, who had struggled with anxiety and depression throughout her life, believed was right for her.

Smith had no private health insurance and was only able to afford a few counselling sessions. Once she ran out of money, she could no longer see the therapist who was helping her.

“I was really discouraged,” she says.

Smith’s experience is the reason Wozney involved her as a Community Advisor to work on research projects, including her work on how to design integrated youth services to support the mental health needs of diverse youth.

That research will inform Nova Scotia’s plans to set up eight integrated hubs to serve youth across the province, where they can receive mental health, addictions, and other services, from employment and training to housing supports, all in one place.

The central hub model is critical because youth don’t want to have to re-tell their stories to different people, which can re-traumatize them. Wozney’s earlier research suggests youth also want holistic approaches to mental health that reflect the complexity of their entire lives, rather than treating mental health in isolation, she says.

Youth are also seeking care that is culturally safe, equitable, and inclusive, she emphasizes.

Keep youth connected

Wozney’s approach is to undertake participatory research to learn “how we do this in a way that honours and reflects your diversity as a person, and how we personalize care, so you are getting the care you need.”

Above all, she wants to ensure services keep youth connected to people who let them know they value them. As Smith’s experience illustrated, if youth don’t feel that from the first time they reach out for help, they may lose any sense of hope for recovery, Wozney says.

“Youth don’t want to be a number, they don’t want to experience a bureaucratic process with a lot of confusing hoops to jump through,” Wozney says. “They want to feel cared for and empowered.”

The Sun Life Chair will give Wozney the ability to pursue promising lines of research and will allow her to build cross-disciplinary teams with colleagues in community health and epidemiology,

There are big questions to grapple with, she says, around whether evolving technology is actually leading to better care experiences and outcomes for youth.

“We want youth to feel more connection and care, not less, so how do we make sure the way we apply technology is improving youth hopefulness, their recovery, and their ability to navigate things?” she asks. “More technology isn’t necessarily the answer.”

The Chair will allow Wozney to pursue long-term national and international partnerships and to spend time ensuring the knowledge she gains can help transform mental health practice through knowledge translation.

Wozney is particularly excited about being able to work more closely with youth because she finds their directness and willingness to speak openly about their experiences of recovery inspiring.

That collaboration “has fuelled my sense of moral obligation for amplifying what they need and using research as a way to spread hope that something better is possible,” she says.

Drew Burchell, a research co-ordinator who works with Wozney, says placing youth voices at the centre of her research about the value of Integrated Youth Services is a principle in which Wozney is deeply invested.

“That’s the kind of work Lori cares most about,” Burchell says. “She lives her values in all of her work.”