Epistemic injustice in experiences of young people with parents with mental health challenges.

Amongst the impacts of growing up with a parent with mental health challenges is the experience of stigma-by-association, in which children and young people experience impacts of stigmatisation due to their parent's devalued identity. This article seeks to expand our understanding of this issue through an abductive analysis of qualitative data collected through a codesign process with young people. Results indicate that young people's experiences of stigmatisation can be effectively understood as experiences of epistemic injustice. Participants expressed that their experiences comprised 'more than' stigma, and their responses suggest the centrality to their experiences of being diminished and dismissed in respect of their capacity to provide accurate accounts of their experiences of marginalisation and distress. Importantly, this diminishment stems not only from their status as children, and as children of parents with mental health challenges but operates through a range of stigmatised identities and devalued statuses, including their own mental health status, sexual minoritisation, disability and social class. Forms of epistemic injustice thus play out across the social and institutional settings they engage with. The psychological and social impacts of this injustice are explored, and the implications for our understanding of stigma around family mental health discussed.

StigmaBeat: Collaborating With Rural Young People to Co-Design Films Aimed at Reducing Mental Health Stigma.

Little is known about the experience and impact of intersectional stigma experienced by rural young people (15-25 years) who have a parent with mental health challenges. The StigmaBeat project employed a co-design approach to create short films to identify and challenge mental health stigma from the perspective of young people who have experienced this phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to describe the co-design methodological approach used in StigmaBeat, as an example of a novel participatory project. We describe one way that co-design can be employed by researchers in collaboration with marginalised young people to produce films aimed at reducing mental health stigma in the community. Through describing the processes undertaken in this project, the opportunities, challenges, and tensions of combining community development methods with research methods will be explored. Co-design with young people is a dynamic and engaging method of collaborative research practice capable of harnessing lived experience expertise to intervene in social issues and redesign or redevelop health services and policies. The participatory approach involved trusting and implementing the suggestions of young people in designing and developing the films and involved creating the physical and social environment to enable this, including embedding creativity, a critical element to the project's methodological success. Intensive time and resource investment are needed to engage a population that is often marginalised in relation to stigma discourse.