ILFA Project - Information and Learning for All

See Me's Communities and Priority Groups team has been working with ILFA since 2023, an organisation that ‘collaborates with communities in Scotland to navigate more inclusive future’. We have been working with the founder of ILFA, also lecturer in Public Health at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), to design and deliver voices through the Lens since September 2023.

This research project adopted a creative approach to tackle mental health stigma, using photography to explore young adversely racialised people’s experiences of mental health stigma and discrimination in Scotland.

The project used PhotoVoice to increase understanding of ethnic minority experiences of mental health stigma and discrimination, by empowering young people to participate, explore their experiences of stigma and discrimination in Glasgow and share their stories to raise awareness of the impact of stigma and discrimination in their communities and beyond. See Me, the project lead and project manager, and public health research students from GCU have worked collaboratively on the project, with participants as co-researchers.

It has created a safe space for young people from minoritised ethnic communities to talk about their mental health more confidently, using creative methods. The project equipped young people with the knowledge and skills to articulate their lived experience of mental health stigma and discrimination through photography. This is important because it provided the young people with a platform to amplify their voices, contribute as co-researchers to a research project, which will fill a necessary gap in evidence, and bring their own expertise to the project.