Reclaiming Student Voices on School-based, Mental Health Impacts: Youth Reflections, Lived Experiences and Recommendations for Transforming Ontario Secondary Schools

In recent years, student mental health has gained considerable attention in Ontarios secondary schools. While the voices of students are central to the discussion about school-based mental health impacts, they are often undervalued or missing altogether in academic and policy literature on the topic. This phenomenological study reclaims and thematically analyzes the reflections of 11 youth participants on the cultural features of their Ontario public secondary school that impacted their mental health. The critical and conceptual theories of Michel Foucault (1988), Paulo Freire (2000), and Corey Keyes (2002) inform this dissertations theoretical framework. Three main findings were revealed in this study: (1) a gendered and stigma-laden culture of silence had a significant mental health impact on the youth in their secondary school; (2) the youth identified a number of supportive and unsupportive educational practices as impactful; and, (3) peer relationships were also shown to be supportive and unsupportive features with mental health impact for the youth, with an emphasis on bullying and peer-support groups. The youth recommendations presented in this study have profound implications for how to best support the mental health of secondary-school-aged youth in Ontario moving forward.