Youth health mental is the ability to manage, regulate and respond to emotions and stress. It is essential to adolescence and young adulthood and plays a key role in ensuring healthy physical, mental, social and economic development.
Adolescents are vulnerable to poor mental health due to their living conditions, stigma and discrimination or lack of access to quality support and services.
Prevention
One of the most important factors to a healthy lifestyle is a well-balanced diet and exercise, but it is also vital that adolescents focus on their mental health as well. They need to know how to handle their emotions when the challenges life throws at them come their way.
Prevention strategies can help to address these issues by promoting mental wellness among adolescents, building protective factors, and increasing access to care. For example, by focusing on healthy behaviors (exercise, nutritious food, limiting screen time) and providing youth with supportive environments and positive role models, it is possible to help them develop strong mental health habits early in life that will support them throughout their lives.
States should work to ensure that young people have access to coverage for mental health and substance use conditions. This includes connecting children and youth to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and other coverage options. This will allow young people to receive mental health and substance use treatment when needed and prevent a crisis from developing in the first place.
Early Identification
Early identification strategies are designed to reduce the incidence of mental illness by identifying the symptoms and warning signs of the condition before it reaches full-blown severity. This helps reduce the burden of the disorder on individuals, their families and communities.
Youth ages 14 to 25 are considered a crucial period in the lifespan for addressing mental health issues. This is because the neurodevelopmental processes in this period of development are both vulnerable and potentially protective for future psychiatric disorders.
Therefore, designing preventive strategies in a youth-focused multidisciplinary and trans-diagnostic framework is important to modify possible psychopathological trajectories. Several independent evidences suggest that, from adolescence to adulthood, the risk of developing a major mental disorder – such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia – can change over time.
A number of factors are known to affect the mental health of young people, including exposure to traumatic events. For example, exposure to negative experiences at home, violent parenting, sexual abuse by trusted adults, discovering orientation and substance abuse can all be detrimental to a child’s mental health.
Treatment
Treatments are designed to help your child overcome a mental health problem and can include psychotherapy, peer mentoring, care coordination, or medication. They are provided in different settings and the type of treatment is based on your child’s needs, diagnosis and severity of the problem.
Anxiety and depression are two of the most common mental health disorders that affect adolescents. These conditions can negatively impact a youth’s social life and school performance, as well as their ability to function in their daily lives.
In the US, rates of anxiety and depression among children and youth ages 3-17 years continue to increase. Moreover, suicide remains the second leading cause of death for young people.
A multilevel approach is required for promotion and prevention interventions. These programmes aim to strengthen the capacity of individuals to regulate emotions, enhance alternatives to risk-taking behaviours, build resilience for managing difficult situations and adversity, and promote supportive social environments and social networks.
Recovery
One in four Canadian youth will experience a mental health disorder at some point in their lives, and more than half of all emergency department visits for mental illness are among adolescents (see Figure 1). As a result, the need to develop effective strategies for youth mental health services that are relevant to and appropriate for young people is urgent.
Recovery models and practice orientations across the English speaking world are based on adult frameworks, with little research to date on youth perspectives and views of recovery. Many recovery studies focus on personal themes and processes occurring within a continuum of less to more recovered, while others adopt alternative approaches that include broader societal conditions that influence recovery such as a culture of healing and recovery-oriented services (Glover, 2012; Leamy et al., 2011; Oades et al., 2005; Schrank & Slade, 2007; Simonds et al., 2014).
Despite the importance of individual recovery processes, recent findings suggest that a dynamic interplay between person-environmental processes is an integral part of the experiences of youth undergoing recovery from mental disorders. This may be especially relevant for young people who are still undergoing key developmental milestones and rely on others to help them through these milestones.