Examining the role of mental health lived experience advocacy in shaping the personal outcomes of youth advocates: A scoping review

Youth mental health remains a pertinent topic of social significance, but clinical services are found have high barriers to entry or are developmentally inappropriate in treating all cases of youth mental ill-health. Lived experience advocacy peer support programmes offer a viable supplementary or alternative option in addressing this issue. Whilst much has been written about the impacts of such programmes on participants, and reviews have been presented about the impacts upon lived experience advocates working in clinical settings, research regarding those working at a community level remains scattered. To synthesise current evidence in the field a scoping review was undertaken. Five databases were searched including MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, ProQuest and PsycINFO which returned 4,785 articles. After screening articles for relevance, 30 studies were included in this review paper, incorporating a range of countries and study types. Our findings suggest that such programmes could offer valuable benefits to advocates in terms of foundational, emotional, spiritual, social and occupational wellness, furthering young people’s personal recovery from mental ill-health. The scoping review makes valuable contributions in understanding the effectiveness of peer support community advocacy programmes and is of particular interest to those involved in the recruitment, training and support of youth lived experience advocates. The review also identified important gaps in the current body of work; namely surrounding training practices, frameworks informing community-based LEA operations, and quantification of impacts generated through advocacy, and calls for further research in this space.