The Crisis in Youth Mental Health

The conference took place on Monday 22 April at the University's historic King's Manor Campus in the Centre of York. The event was jointly hosted with the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH), a UK-based organisation that seeks to raise standards in the understanding and management of child mental health issues and which publishes several international, high-impact journals. Several of the speakers were members of the ACAMH leadership team and its governing board. More than 120 people attended throughout the day, including researchers from across the University, representatives from eight NHS mental health Trusts and members of the public. 

Following a welcome by IMRY Director Professor Lina Gega, the event opened with an address by Andy Bell, the Chief Executive of the Centre for Mental Health. He started by rejecting the charge that young people lack resilience, identifying the many sizable social and environmental challenges that young people experience from climate change to youth poverty and inequality. He emphasised the importance of having a comprehensive system of mental health support for young people to avoid the current situation where many who were not in crisis but needed more support than is often provided through standard pastoral support and education in schools, are falling through the cracks. The Centre has produced a manifesto for 'A Mentally Healthier Nation', widely endorsed by other UK charities, urging all political parties to commit to a ten-year, cross-government plan for mental health and ministers to routinely weigh up the potential impact on mental health of all public policy proposals.

Prabha Choubina, Publications Director at ACAMH introduced the organisation and its current priorities, including its publications, where Prof Bernadka Dubicka is Editor in Chief of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) Journal, and Prof Lina Gega is a joint editor. Megan Archer, Deputy Director of ACAMH and Dr Mark Lovell, ACAMH Director for CPD and Training, then took up the baton in introducing the new ACAMHLearn platform, a new online content portal, launching in September 2024, containing ACAMH’s extensive library of audio and visual content together with specially commissioned new videos from experts with diverse academic and clinical backgrounds tailored to parents, young people, teachers and a diverse range of mental health professionals.

Dr Cornelius Ani, Deputy Editor in Chief of the CAMH journal and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London spoke about the need to increase equity and inclusion in child and adolescent mental health and how strength and benefits for all come from harnessing a diversity of perspectives. He was joined in conversation by Dr Eunice Ayodeji, ACAMH Board Member, Trauma Therapist with Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust and Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing at the University of Salford, in considering the arguments for moving past cultural competence to cultural humility in clinical practice with young people. This means going beyond demonstrating an awareness of and respect for other cultures, to committing lifelong to engaging and learning about different cultures and setting aside one’s own biases to reflect fairly and openly on their perspectives and beliefs. They both also observed that it is a priority to find more effective and innovative ways of reaching several growing minority religious communities in the UK which are particularly underserved in terms of mental health support.

Professor Harriet Over from the Department of Psychology at the University of York switched the focus to the harmful impacts on young people’s mental health, and beyond, of the rise of misogynistic attitudes amongst the younger generation, particularly males, over the last decade. This trend has been fuelled by a number of high-profile online influencers and Harriet and colleagues are exploring ways in which they can harness psychological insights to challenge these false and destructive narratives (for all genders) through school and online interventions.

The day ended with Professor Bernadka Dubicka delivering her York Inaugural Lecture which continued on the same theme of the crisis in young people's mental health. Bernadka spoke about her three decades working in child mental health, including the challenges of publicising negative findings and opinions that depart from orthodoxies but also of the rewards in persevering towards where the evidence is pointing. She echoed the observations of other speakers that the best prescription for youth mental health would be to do more to resolve the structural inequalities and deprivations that largely fuel mental disorders, together with the impact of social media and the ecological crisis. She ended on a note of hope, citing the potential for technology to facilitate and widen access to early interventions including in her current BAY trial of adolescent depression, and the important role of brief interventions in depression as a cost-effective first-line treatment.