What We Study

Access to Care

We study how youth and young adults with mental health-related disabilities experience help-seeking, unmet need, service access, continuity, and support. This work asks how functional impairments, institutional demands, service design, and social conditions interact to make the same system more accessible for some people than for others.

Structural Vulnerability

We examine how relationships, institutions, policies, systems, resources, and social conditions shape people's options and outcomes. This work seeks to make structural mechanisms visible and to identify where policy, organizational, and community changes can alter the conditions that produce vulnerability.

Participatory Power

We study how power operates in research relationships, including who participates, whose knowledge is treated as authoritative, how decisions are made, how credit and compensation are distributed, and how research teams can reflect on and shift power. This area includes the PARTNER Tool and the Lab's developing co-researcher infrastructure.

Equity-centred Indicators

We explore how access, outcomes, participation, and change can be measured in ways that make inequities visible and reflect what communities say matters. This includes work on definitions of access and unmet need, intersectional quantitative analysis, and the development of indicators that can inform policy and systems decisions.

Engagement and Public Scholarship

We use relational and low-barrier approaches such as dialogue, town halls, tabling, explainers, digital resources, presentations, and public-facing tools to share research and create opportunities for communities to shape what happens next.

E: mapslab@wlu.ca

Mental Health Accessibility and Policy Solutions Lab (MAPS) Lab