By Giovanni Abrahão Salum, MD, PhD
Vice-President, Global Programs, Child Mind Institute
&
Antonis Kousoulis, MD, MSc, DrPH
Director of Partnerships at United for Global Mental Health & Secretariat Lead of the Global Mental Health Action Network
Humanitarian imperative
New research projects that expand mental health interventions could contribute USD 4.3 trillion to the global economy and add 57 million people to the global labor force by 2050, representing a humanitarian imperative and major economic opportunity. As we continue to move with urgency and purpose, our cross-sector partnerships model has already yielded transformative results in advocating for and advancing quality youth mental health care, accessibility and reducing the knowledge gap.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute alongside our partners, United for Global Mental Health and the Global Mental Health Action Network, have uncovered staggering gaps in youth mental health care data in LMICs. In addition, we have found that most of the available datasets were collected prior to 2010 and do not reflect our youth’s current needs. Such outdated data is fundamentally disconnected from the real, urgent needs of today’s youth and hampers the ability to make evidence-based policy decisions. The devastating effects of events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, war and conflict, political instability, economic volatility, and systemic underinvestment in youth mental health remain largely uncaptured.
Currently, children and adolescents living in low and middle-income countries are the most negatively affected by mental health data gaps and lack of culturally adapted care and resources. Our joint study, “Data Gaps in Prevalence Rates of Mental Health Conditions Around the World: A Retrospective Analysis of Nationally Representative Data,” recently published in The Lancet Global Health Journal, reveals that the largest documented gaps are in the Western Pacific and Africa. The fragmented data and infrastructure to support those who need care most remain shockingly insufficient.
Without accurate, culturally relevant data informing policy, strengthening systems to improve the mental health landscape is impossible. The alarming consequence is interventions with cascading blind spots where information is incomplete or culturally misaligned.
Sustainable youth mental health initiatives require strengthened coordination and alignment across sectors. This approach is intended to strategically target the complexity of the interconnected layers of youth mental health challenges, including physical and emotional wellbeing, social connections and cultural backgrounds, which are factors that can affect each other and form pieces of the same puzzle.
Innovation through integration: cross-sector mental health solutions
To drive upstream initiatives, we are focused on promoting partnerships across various sectors including education, technology, civil society organizations, the private sector, youth-led organizations, and creative industries, always strongly underpinned by the expertise of lived experience. Each brings a unique perspective on interventions, while ensuring solutions that are effective across cultures and communities.
Our work in transforming children’s lives is centered on cross-sector collaboration that addresses system gaps. Only when we have accurate data can we change how we understand and respond to child and adolescent mental health and see a promising path forward. This includes exploring avenues such as:
- Cross-sector data sharing agreements between education and healthcare systems developed with youth input
- Technology partnerships to analyze mental health trends among young people and AI development
- Joint training initiatives between mental health professionals
- Low-intensity interventions
- Creating innovative funding mechanisms alongside the financial sector
- Partnerships with academic institutions that place youth as co-researchers to revolutionize data collection methods while capturing lived experiences
Another important factor to note within cross-sector partnerships is the adoption of open-science frameworks, which support the transparent sharing of data, protocols, and analytical methods that transcend geographical and institutional boundaries. The above examples are scalable focus areas requiring further development and investment.
Youth as co-leaders: ethical approaches to data practices
The inclusion of youth as partners and co-leaders can transform approaches from well-intentioned interventions to authentic co-creation that addresses both clinical needs and lived experiences. Our work alongside global youth advocates and youth-led organizations has catapulted our efforts in minimizing stigma, unlocking ways of interpreting and disseminating knowledge and data, and creating opportunities for young people to embody their role as active citizens.
Young people are more than just recipients of mental health interventions — they are experts in designing and implementing the programs and services that best address their needs. Their feedback on issues such as participation, data collection, and privacy is instrumental in fostering genuine engagement, improving implementation outcomes, ensuring cultural relevance of assessment tools, and developing ethical frameworks.
Ultimately, youth partnerships and higher participation rates can strengthen entire data systems, enable strategic resource allocation, and improve mental health systems that youth can trust. To ensure effective interventions that match reality, the need to systematically remove barriers through community-led implementation strategies, youth partnership, culturally responsive data collection methods, and adaptable frameworks is critical.
These collaborative methods require expanded cross-sector partnerships and the establishment of a common measurable language that also facilitates meaningful comparisons and harmonization of definitions across diverse cultures and communities. This would also mean institutions such as schools, community organizations, tech companies, and so forth, can create shared ways to talk about and measure youth mental health across different cultural environments. Together, we can identify effective interventions rather than disconnected, standardized approaches.
This will result in higher participation and retention rates, more accurate and up-to-date data, better resource allocation, effective knowledge sharing, and equitable service delivery to underserved communities.
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