The Youth Promotion of Resilience Involving Mental e-Health (Y-PRIME) Study, conducted in partnership between researchers and youth partners in Vietnam and Canada (including at Foundry), was developed to advance youth-centred mental health promotion, prevention and support. The study team aims to do so by prioritizing youth engagement in mental health research and co-design of an app-based intervention to promote mental well-being for youth in Vietnam.
The study includes international collaboration between a Youth Advisory Council of diverse Vietnamese youth (V-YAC) focused on intervention development and a Youth Advisory Council of Foundry youth across Canada (F-YAC) with extensive experience in research engagement and mental health advocacy. While cultural contexts vary between Vietnam and Canada, understanding youth mental health, service access and engagement across both settings offers valuable insights into opportunities for improvement in these areas while fostering peer-to-peer capacity building around mental health research participation and advocacy.
From March 2024 to March 2025, our year-long collaboration is taking place through a series of virtual, youth-led sessions between the V-YAC and F-YAC. During these sessions, youth share personal experiences of accessing mental health services, their understanding of mental health within different cultural contexts and the ways in which collaboration and engagement across contexts could inform future local and global mental health research. These experiences inspired an upcoming blog series, written by the youth themselves, to help raise awareness about common challenges and opportunities related to youth mental health and engagement in both Canada and Vietnam.
The Y-PRIME Study highlights the importance of creating youth-led spaces and opportunities to share lived and living experiences, engage in reciprocal learning and share knowledge across cultures and contexts. The experience offers valuable guidance for researchers, practitioners and youth research partners seeking to develop culturally appropriate and youth-centric digital approaches to mental well-being.
The Y-PRIME project is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research under the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases’ Life Course Research Program. It is an international collaboration between Canada (University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Foundry Central Office) and Vietnam (Institute of Population Health and Development, Hanoi Youth Union, Hanoi Department of Education and Training). The study is led by Drs. Jill Murphy and Raymond Lam (Canada) and Dr. Vu Cong Nguyen (Vietnam), with support from the larger Y-PRIME study team, which includes Foundry Head Scientist Dr. Skye Barbic. The youth collaboration is facilitated by Rosie Tran and Dr. Stefanie Machado, with support from Corinne Tallon.
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