What is the Mental Health and Cannabis project?

Our project seeks to explore the relationship between cannabis use and mental health and wellness. We specifically look at the perspectives of youth ages 18 to 30 years old within immigrant, refugee, ethnocultural, and racialized (IRER) communities in Ottawa.

  • Why is this important? Most research on youth and cannabis use does not consider immigration or ethno racial background (CAMH, 2018)
  • Highlight the oppressive barriers and systemic failures that youth face daily and how to navigate and what solutions are needed

What are our principles as researchers?

Reflexivity

We commit to fostering reflexivity and self- examination, making our social locations explicit, and confronting our own biases through all stages of the research project and all research activities.

Reflexivity "Means turning of the researcher lens back onto oneself to recognize and take responsibility for one's own situatedness within the research and the effect that it may have on the setting and people being studied, questions being asked, data being collected and its interpretation" (Berger, 2015, p. 220)

Anti-Racism

Anti-racism is a social movement, framework, and a set of practices. Being committed to anti-racism requires meaningful and intentional action to dismantle the systems that contribute to the ongoing harm and oppression against racialized communities. These systems move beyond understanding race as ones skin colour or a classification. Rather, race needs to be "understood as a social construction that orders and contains as well as interlocks with other vectors of power and oppression (Razack, Smith & Thobani, 2010)

Anti-Oppressive Practice

Anti-oppressive practice is focused on understanding and responding to all forms of oppression. Within the broader spectrum of anti-oppression, anti-racism frameworks focus explicitly on the power dynamics related to race and the structural root causes and impacts of racism

Research Project

Subject: Understanding Immigrant, Refugee, Ethnocultural, and Racialized (IRER) Youth’s Experiences of the Relationship Between Cannabis Use and Mental Health Using Experience-Based Co-Design method (EBCD).

Priority population: Immigrant, refugee, ethnocultural, and racialized youth who use cannabis This project seeks to explore how IRER youth experience.

Research conducted by the Centre for Resilience and Social Development and Social Research and Demonstration Corporation. 

Hash It Out Report

The Experiences of IRER Youth With Cannabis and Mental Health

Research Project Report

Farnaz Farhang

Research Coordinator & Project Manager

Email: farnaz@thecrsd.org