When it comes to supporting young people’s mental health, the importance of validation comes up again and again in our work.
In this series we’re doing a deep dive on why it’s coming up so often – as well as the dangers of invalidation, how to validate a young person, and the different ways and situations in which validation can appear.
“That sounds hard.”
Just like ‘I love you’, these three words sound simple but can be incredibly powerful.
The importance of validating mental health experiences – in any situation, but particularly in clinical settings – is something that our young people’s advisory groups (YPAGs), from their position of sharing their lived experiences in research settings, have told us is incredibly important.
In this blog series we’ll learn about why this is, and offer some advice from both young people and our research on how to do it well.
What is validation?
So, first up – what does it mean to validate young people when it comes to their mental health?
Validation is accepting someone’s experience, separate to agreeing with it or judging it, and regardless of whether you’ve experienced it – or even fully understand it – yourself. It boils down to: “I hear what you’re saying and accept that it’s true for you.”
It’s a straightforward, unequivocal acknowledgement of the other person’s experience -one that’s both surprisingly powerful and surprisingly easy to forget to do.
We’ll go more into how to validate – and avoid invalidating – young people in our next blog.
The stakes are high, as feeling validated can be the difference between continuing to accept support and going home feeling like it’s not worth engaging again.
Why is validation so important in mental health?
In the situations we’re mostly focussing on in this blog – a young person seeking help from a doctor, therapist or psychiatrist, for example – feeling validated can be an important part of the process of building trust, especially within the doctor-patient power dynamic.
The stakes are high, as feeling validated can be the difference between continuing to accept support and going home feeling like it’s not worth engaging again.
We’re also hearing young people talk about the dangers of invalidating – and that having an experience that invalidates people’s feelings can be worse than not getting support at all.
I’ve had experiences where it’s like, ‘oh, you’re a mental health patient’ – their whole tone changes. That makes me feel like my pain and my reality is not real or valid.
McPin team member Rosie
“It makes me feel like my pain and my reality is not real”
The Agency project, and its follow-up, Agency-in-practice, explored how young people feel helped or harmed by mental healthcare interactions. It identified five steps to help give young people agency over their mental health journey, and step one was validation.
The team reviewed interviews of young people and practitioners, and found it was rare for young people’s experiences to be validated – and yet the young people advising on the study shared how important validation was to the recovery process.
Speaking in the Agency podcast, McPin team member Rosie said:
“I’ve had experiences where it’s like, ‘oh, you’re a mental health patient’ – their whole tone changes. That makes me feel like my pain and my reality is not real or valid – it creates…more of a distance between you and the practitioner and if someone’s validating you, you feel like, we can work together, you’re hearing me, you’re understanding me, you’re accepting what I’m saying.”
We’ll hear more from the Agency study in the next blog, but in the meantime you can listen to the Agency podcast here.
How to meaningfully validate young people
Ultimately, while validation is only one piece of the puzzle for supporting young people – or anyone – with their mental health, it’s clearly an important one.
What’s great though is that getting into a validation mindset can probably benefit most of our relationships, clinical or otherwise.
So, stay tuned – in our next blog we’ll look more in depth at the Agency study and our team and YPAGs’ experiences for advice on how to meaningfully validate young people.
Read more about the Agency project and its follow-up, Agency-in-Practice.
Listen to the Agency podcast on Soundcloud.
