A Picture of Health – 2008 British Columbia Adolescent Health Survey

Forward

Perry Kendall
OBC, MBBS, MSc, FRCPC
Provincial Health Officer

This, the fourth in a series of health surveys of British Columbia’s adolescents, shows once again how important it is to have timely and accurate data and information on the health, behaviours, knowledge, beliefs and attitudes of our young people.Policy making and program design are at their best when they are informed by a body of fact. The McCreary Centre Society Adolescent Health Surveys are designed to give decision makers, elected officials, program designers and deliverers just that. A rich source of information from which patterns and trends, and important associations can be drawn.

Adolescence is a transitional period between childhood and adulthood. As a life stage it offers tremendous opportunities and challenges in the voyage to maturity. If we believe that it takes a village to raise a child then we realize that we are that village, and all BC children are our children. To raise them successfully as a society, we need to know a lot about them.

We need to be driven by good information if we are to be able to meet our obligations to our children under the United Nations Convention Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Canada is a signatory, which states that every child has:
o the right to survival
o the right to develop to the fullest
o the right to protection from harmful influences,
o abuse and exploitation, and
o the right to participate fully in family cultural and social life.

Article 12 of the Convention further enshrines the right to be heard. While it is essential that this right is honoured at the level of the individual, taking the ‘temperature’ of the broader child population is essential for policy makers and senior managers who are often far removed from the practical day-to-day lives of children and youth.

Indeed without the kind of information the AHS provides we are both deaf and blind and navigating in what is often a sea of misinformation, hyperbole and sometimes even panic.

Lurid media stories about rampant sexual activities or drug use by this population are not only the means by which papers are sold, they are also too frequently the starting point for well-intentioned but misguided interventions.

Looking at AHS IV for instance we can surely be gratified to learn that in comparison to previous years, adolescents in 2008 were even more responsible when it came to behaviours like initiating sexual activity, and despite an almost moral panic over methamphetamines taking over the souls of our children, rates of ever having used dropped from 4% in 2003 to 2% in 2008 (a statistically, and surely a socially, significant difference).

All however is not roses. 6% of respondents indicated feeling so much despair (sad, discouraged or hopeless) that they wondered if anything was worthwhile. Females were twice as likely to report feeling this way in the past month as were males. That one in eight young women in BC feel this way should cause us concern, as should the finding
that compared with 2003 fewer youth reported
in 2008 that they felt they could seek support from an adult. Is it that we seem too busy to listen, or too wrapped up in our own concerns?

This 4th report also contains some extraordinarily powerful insights. Perhaps the most powerful being that children who have been physically and sexually abused – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable – are NINE times less likely to report suicidal ideation if they have high levels of school connectedness than if they report low levels. The relevance and importance of this piece of information should be obvious to everyone involved in schools, or who cares about vulnerable youth.

I offer my thanks and appreciation to the visionaries at the McCreary Centre Society, to its funders in government, academia and health authorities, to school boards for participating, to the many persons who carried out the survey and most of all, to the youth who gave us this information about themselves.

We have the tools, we also now have the obligation to use them.

Perry Kendall

>> Download report A Picture of Health – 2008 British Columbia Adolescent Health Survey