Maybe it’s happened to you; looking for help, someone hands you a questionnaire instead. On a scale from Fine to Horrible, rate each aspect of your life. The questionnaire gives you a number; it’s 8. Now you’re an 8, and you don’t know how this helps you, or what it means. Sadly, your clinician doesn’t either. In Canada we fill mountains of questionnaires, but we ignore them or can’t understand them. These questionnaires are the closest thing we have to measuring someone’s mental health. Our team asks: How can we make these tools useful for everyone? Our answer: By helping each other understand what they are about, and how to use them. We are service providers, scientists and philosophers; we’re developing a curriculum to teach service providers about measurement. We’d like to tell you about this process and ask for your feedback on the product we’re hoping to pilot.
Presenters and slide deck
Skye Barbic, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia
Skye is the Head Scientist at Foundry and an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. She is passionate about meaningful and ethical measurement of outcomes.
Sebastian Rodriguez Duque
Sebastian is a PhD candidate at McGill. He works on issues at the intersection of philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. His thesis is about measurement in psychiatry and the conceptual issues that arise when we consider the nature of mental health and un-health. He has ongoing research interests in the philosophy of action and the insights it can offer our understanding of moral psychology.
Key Learnings
- Meaningful measurement requires a co-creative process with youth
- We're working on a guidebook to help clinicians understand what is involved in a good measurement practice
- Our dream is to empower youth and their communities through good measurement practices