Mental Health Accessibility and Policy Solutions (MAPS) Lab

About MAPS Lab

People, Places and Possibilities.

MAPS Lab studies how people and systems come together to shape mental health accessibility, disability, participation, and possibilities.

The Mental Health Accessibility and Policy Solutions Lab (MAPS Lab) is an emancipatory, community-engaged research lab at Wilfrid Laurier University in Kitchener, Ontario. We study how people, relationships, services, institutions, environments, and policies shape mental health accessibility and the possibilities available to people when mental health challenges become disabling. Our research has particular depth in the experiences of youth and young adults with mental health-related disabilities, including disabilities that may be invisible, episodic, fluctuating, or difficult for systems to recognize.

At MAPS Lab, accessibility means more than whether a service exists or whether someone gets through the front door. Access is also shaped by whether a need is recognized; whether support is reachable, understandable, and usable; whether institutional expectations fit a person's functional, social, and cultural realities; whether relationships can be sustained over time; and whether people can return after disruption. This approach treats accessibility as relational, temporal, and produced through interactions between people and the systems around them.

Our work examines access to care and unmet need, structural vulnerability, disability, institutional recognition and misrecognition, equity-centred measurement, participation, power in research relationships, and the design of more responsive systems. We are interested in the mechanisms that generate inequities and in the conditions that can expand people's opportunities to participate, learn, access support, contribute knowledge, and flourish.

MAPS Lab brings together multiple forms of evidence and expertise. Critical realism provides an important philosophical foundation because it supports research that moves from describing patterns to asking what structures, relationships, and mechanisms could be generating them. We use quantitative, qualitative, participatory, community-engaged, evidence-synthesis, mapping, and other methods according to the questions being asked. Lived and living experience is treated as a form of expertise that can shape research questions, study design, interpretation, governance, and how knowledge moves beyond the research team.

The “Policy Solutions” in MAPS reflects an orientation toward action. Our work is designed to contribute to policy and systems change through empirical evidence, conceptual models, equity-centred indicators, practical research tools, organizational processes, public scholarship, community-engagement infrastructure, and policy-relevant recommendations. We are also developing ways to make research itself more accessible and reciprocal, including youth and young adult co-researcher opportunities, public-facing town halls, accessible research communication, and new approaches to knowledge reciprocity and social movements.

MAPS is also a learning community. Students and trainees participate in real research and public scholarship while developing skills in research design, evidence synthesis, data analysis, research ethics, community engagement, knowledge mobilization, project management, writing, and grant development. Our guiding idea is captured in the phrase People, Places and Possibilities: people bring knowledge, identities, relationships, histories, capacities, and agency; places include services, communities, organizations, institutions, and policy systems; and possibilities refer to what those relationships and conditions make more or less possible. A second phrase, Knowledge lives in community, reflects our commitment to research that recognizes knowledge as already present across lived experience, practice, relationships, and communities.