What did we do?

Since September 2023, 12 young men have attended the Young People’s Forum. We have held 32 forum sessions over more than 100 hours of workshops, and eaten a lot of delicious food. We’ve created men with Lego, played snakes and ladders and quizzed ourselves Who Wants to be a Millionaire? style. We’ve talked about mental health, and societal expectations, role models, identities, stigma and why we decided to be part of this unique research project.

Along the way we’ve all learned a lot about each other and about young men’s mental health. The project team have learned a little about what it is like to be a young man in Scotland today and the forum have learned a little about how to do research.

In addition, the Forum has undertaken research with our peers. We’ve spoken to 20 young men about mental health and taking part in mental health research and 40 young men have completed our anonymous survey. We’ve held research conversations with young men in art galleries, offices, prisons, the park and online. We’ve spent time listening to what everyone has had to say and we’ve analysed the conversations to identify what are the common issues that people have been telling us about.

We’ve met with our partners (The Anchor SCIO, Includem and YouthLink) to share our early findings and these organisations listened to what we have to say and are now thinking about what changes they can make to better support young men’s mental health.

We have been busy writing reports and other outputs and thinking about how to share what we have learned with a whole range of different audiences, including: boys and young men, parents and carers, people working in mental health, schools, other organisations and even politicians and influencers!

So far, we’ve launched a comic for boys and young men to help break reduce shame and stigma about young men’s mental health, and we have distributed more than 1,000 copies to schools, organisations and workers who support boys and young men. On Tuesday 20th May we took our findings to the Scottish Parliament and held an event, sponsored by Paul Sweeney MSP and attended by the Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport of Scotland (Maree Todd) to call for action and raise awareness of young men’s mental health. We also presented to hundreds of practitioners and others at in-person and online events

In the meantime, if you want to get in touch, or have an idea for an event you can contact us using the buttons below.