Understanding youth professionals’ perceptions of poverty and its link to youth mental health

Youth growing up in poverty face an increased risk of mental health problems due to a complex interplay of stressors in different life domains. Interdisciplinary collaboration between youth professionals from different disciplines is needed to comprehensively address this interplay of poverty-related stressors in integrated youth care. However, little is known about how youth professionals from different disciplines conceptualize poverty and its impact on youth mental health, even though such perceptions are likely to shape how they perceive their role and responsibilities in interdisciplinary collaboration. Therefore, we interviewed 32 youth professionals from mental healthcare and social care as well as policy makers about their conceptualizations of poverty, its perceived causes, and its relationship to mental health problems. Overall, our findings indicate that youth professionals in different disciplines conceptualize poverty in narrow ways and vary considerably in how they interpret the causes of poverty, the strength of the association between poverty and youth mental health, and the mechanisms to explain this relationship. As our findings suggest that professionals’ role perceptions largely align with these varying perceptions, this can complicate collaboration across disciplines. Our findings suggest that youth professionals may therefore need training to broaden their conceptualizations of poverty, deepen their understanding of poverty’s impact on mental health and to examine their assumptions about the causes of poverty. This could be supported at a policy level by developing a coherent interdisciplinary vision in youth care of what poverty actually constitutes and how it should be addressed in youth with mental health problems.