Exploring mental health and potential health assets in young people

Young people in Sweden generally claim to have a good quality of life, but also report increasing mental health problems. It is a concern that only a minority of young people seek and/or access support when encountering mental health problems as mental health is a fundamental human right and integral to a positive development in both childhood and throughout the lifespan. There are uncertainties as to how to facilitate help-seeking and promote mental health among young people and previous studies have often focused on risk-reduction. A shift from a pathological view to a resource-based perspective of mental health can be achieved by adopting a health assets’ approach. This approach also ascribes due emphasis to the fact that mental health is developed within a social context, where both individual and structural health assets, such as the support system, are of importance. With this in mind, the overall aim of this thesis was to explore individual and structural health assets in relation to the mental health of young people. This thesis is based on four studies using both quantitative (Studies I and II) and qualitative (Study III) methods as well as a scoping review method with a qualitative synthesis (Study IV). Studies I and II had a cross-sectional design and utilized data from self-reported health-related ratings collected in schools in 2011. The association between socio-economic determinants and self-rated mental health in two age groups (11-13 and 14-16) was explored in Study I, and optimism and pessimism as a bi-dimensional construct, and its impact on health-related quality of life and potential to function as a health asset was explored in Study II. In Studies III and IV, the help- seeking process was explored from the perspective of young people, firstly with constructivist grounded theory in Study III based on interviews of young people seeking help for mental health problems within a local setting, and secondly, through a scoping review examination and qualitative synthesis of national and international literature on help-seeking in Study IV. The results identified potential health assets on both individual and structural levels. The explored health assets on an individual level were socio-economic status and socio-demographic factors (Study I), dispositional optimism (Study II) and individual resources for help-seeking (Studies III and IV), while health assets on a structural level were explored through the experience of and perceptions of yo