Want to connect with other people who are passionate about LGBTQ+ youth mental health?

Calling all practitioners, researchers, clinicians, policy makers and members of the public interested in LGBTQ+ youth mental health – we need you!

Earlier this summer we (Catt Turney and Hazel Marzetti) attended an event run by the Emerging Minds network, where Young Minds’ CEO Emma Thomas gave a talk about the charity’s brilliant work supporting young people’s mental health. After the event, we reflected on our shared experience of working in both university-led research and the voluntary sector, and the challenges we had experienced in joining up research and practice and communicating work across the sectors. We agreed that that there never seemed to be enough communication and joined-up working across sectors, and that although we were both keen to do more of this, opportunities were hard to come by for both researchers and practitioners.  It was here that the idea of the LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health Gathering was born!

Whatever your role, it can often feel like we are rushing from pillar to post without time to breathe. We hope that the LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health Gathering on 13 October will give us all an opportunity to pause for a moment. We are asking for folks from across the UK who are interested in LGBTQ+ youth mental health to come and join us online and tell us about their interests, the work they’re doing, the challenges they may be facing, and how we as a community can help each other work towards a common aim of improving the lives of LGBTQ+ young people.

This event will be shaped by you, and we’d love you and your work/experience/views/questions to be part of it. You might want to run hands-on workshop, a brief chat about what your organisation does, or a formal presentation on your research. You might want to show a film or some artwork, pose questions to the other participants, or facilitate a discussion. We want to hear your voices and find out what you do and why you’re passionate about it. We hope that through this event will can forge new connections between researchers, clinicians and practitioners, and find new ways to share our work and keep in touch with one another.

The event will be completely online to allow people from all across the UK to take part, and is likely to be spread over the afternoon and into the early evening to allow for young people to also attend. If other commitments mean that you can only come to part of the event, you’re are most welcome to join us in any way that you can.

If you would like to be involved in the event and are not sure where to start get in contact with us at lgbtqyouthmhnetwork@gmail.com and we can develop session ideas, or if you’ve got a clear idea of what you’d like to present fill out our ‘Suggest A Session’ form here: https://bit.ly/SuggestASession_LGBTQMH . Please contact us by 2 September if at all possible, as we will start to put the programme together after this date, but if you are worried you won’t make the deadline and have an idea you’d like to submit, email us and we can work out how to make it work!

Why LGBTQ+ mental health?

We are both passionate about developing better understandings of and support for LGBTQ+ young people’s mental health and wellbeing. LGBTQ+ young people are well-established as experiencing worse mental health than their cisgender, heterosexual peers, and although exceptional work is happening within communities, there is often not good communication or shared knowledge about the best ways to make things better for LGBTQ+ people both at an individual, interpersonal or societal level. We hope that through the kinds of connections we make at the LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health Gathering we can begin to think collectively about how we can work together to tackle this issue and improve things for LGBTQ+ youth, as well as creating a UK wide network for mutual support and advice.

 

2 thoughts on “Want to connect with other people who are passionate about LGBTQ+ youth mental health?

  1. Hey there,

    This seems amazing. I did my PhD in sexual minority mental health in adolescence. I actively research factors associated with wellbeing and/or poor mental health outcomes in sexual minorities.

    1. Hi Rebekah, so glad you think so! Your PhD research sounds right up our street, so if you’d like to suggest a session we’d be really, very interested! Thanks and hope you can make it along. Best wishes,
      Hazel

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