Promoting youth mental health
Most mental health disorders arise in adolescence – yet research on youth mental health has been fragmented and underfunded. This collection of reviews published across the Nature Portfolio, BMC and Springer journals takes a step towards benchmarking the state of knowledge on interventions for preventing and treating anxiety and depression in young people aged 14-24. The reviews take a number of different approaches to evidence synthesis – scoping, systematic, meta-analytic, realist, narrative – but each review focuses on a different ‘active ingredient’ that has been hypothesized to underpin the effectiveness of existing youth mental health interventions. The ‘active ingredients’ approach is at the core of the strategy of the Wellcome Trust’s Mental Health Challenge Area, which commissioned and funded the reviews (decisions on each manuscript were made independently, by the editorial teams at each participating journal). Taken together, the reviews lay the foundation for future research on more targeted, personalized interventions for preventing youth anxiety and depression.
