From Science to Art: Research on homeless youth leads to a multi-dimensional picture of life on the street

Researchers at CAMH and the University of Toronto have released the initial results of the Youth Pathways Project (YPP). Made up of three research components - queer youth; street involved youth and pregnancy; and maltreatment – this project focused on issues of ethnic and sexual diversity, drug use and mental health faced by youth living in high-risk environments on or close to the street.

Led by CAMH’s Dr. Patricia Erickson, YPP generated new knowledge about the quality of life experienced by street-involved youth. For example, data from the study Young, Queer, & Homeless in Toronto revealed:

• 70.2% of queer street youth had contemplated suicide,
• 57.4% of queer street youth were diagnosed with a mental illness, and
• 80% of queer youth reported a dependency on three or more illicit drugs.

All of these rates were significantly higher than those found in heterosexual street youth.

Street Involved Youth and Pregnancy filled important knowledge gaps on the rates of pregnancy, and child bearing or fathering in street-involved youth.  For example:

• 60% of street-involved young women reported having been pregnant at least once. Twenty-nine per cent of those who had been pregnant had children, 33% had abortions, and 75% of those who had been pregnant reported at least one miscarriage.
• 44% of males in the study reported that they were responsible for a least one pregnancy, and 56% of those were fathers.

In addition to providing much-needed data on street-involved youth, the YPP findings are critical to informing policy related to service needs, substance use treatment, child protection, mental health promotion, and violence prevention in street-involved youth.

While conducting interviews among youth in Toronto, the YPP team noticed that the youth were articulate and surprisingly candid about their lives and experiences on and off the streets. The insights and anecdotes that they shared gave an extra dimension to the data and statistics generated by the research. These youth obviously had a desire to share their stories, but often lacked the means and opportunity to do so.

To address this need, Dr. Erickson and her team created Toronto Youth Street Stories (TYSS).  This project offered an innovative way to collect experiences, disseminate knowledge gained from these studies, and paint a multi-dimensional picture of the realities experienced by youth living on or near the streets of a major Canadian city.  The result is a dynamic web site featuring poetry, prose and visual arts that tell the stories of street-involved youth. 

Visit www.tyss.org for more information on both the Youth Pathways Project and Toronto Youth Street Stories.

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