On March 30th 2021 SRA (Society for Research on Adolescents) published an interview with Dr. Sana Shahram. Sana is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health & Social Development and the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. She is also the lead in our CLARITY project, which aims to promote community-based initiatives and actions to support resiliency among all youth in our communities in an effort to prevent suicide risk before it arises. Here’s an excerpt of Dr. Sana Shahram’s interview with SRA discussing her recent paper.
As we enter year 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are expressing concern about how this experience has affected our collective mental health. In particular, most of us are curious as to how we can bolster resilience among adolescents and young people in our lives.
We sat down with Dr. Sana Shahram to discuss her recent paper: Promoting “Zest for Life”: A Systematic Literature Review of Resiliency Factors to Prevent Youth Suicide. With her team, Dr. Shahram conducted an intensive review of the literature linked to resiliency among youth.
Instead of focusing specifically on building individual levels of youth resilience, however, our conversation focused largely on a simple, but powerful, question: “How do we create systems and communities that don’t require so much resilience from our youth?”
