The Youth Mental Health Crisis is a concern for both the nation and the world as many advocates believe that today’s youth have to grow up in an environment that may be slowly eroding their safety, sense of belonging, and hope for the future. In late 2025, the second Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing Official launch was in Washington, D.C. where Global Leaders in Health, Researchers, and Advocates for Youth, discussed youth mental health as a major issue, and the need for coordinated efforts to address youth mental health.
Panelists indicated that youth mental health is not just about individual vulnerabilities, but the environmental factors contributing to youth mental health problems such as economic instability, online bullying, academic pressure, racial injustice and climate anxiety and that all of these contribute to the risk. The commission’s main message was that youth mental health, needs to be a shared responsibility across all education, health, social service and community service systems. Additionally, young people need to have a voice in developing solutions.
This translates into the need for more school-based services for students, more peer-support resources for students, and more family-inclusive models of care. Research presented during the meeting showed that when a comprehensive, school-based mental health system exists, which integrates counseling, preventive services, crisis intervention and multi-community partnerships (like in California’s Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative), youth will experience considerably better outcomes than when none of these systems are in place.
Speaking at the launch, young people described youth mental health as a crisis and an opportunity. They spoke of needing adult listeners to provide non-judgmental support to young people, culturally and gender-identifying mental health services and policy that fits the proportion of the problems facing them. Many of these same youth also run their own peer support groups, advocacy organizations and online campaigns that aim to normalize the conversation about youth mental health and encourage early help-seeking behavior.
The message is clear; if the U.S. is committed to building healthier futures, it must begin investing significantly in youth mental health NOW. This will require ongoing and adequate funding and development of the workforce, national strategies to unify what schools and clinics are doing with what communities are doing, and overall collaboration to ensure that no young person has to go through their challenges alone.
Source: HHS Surgeon General – Youth Mental Health; McKinsey – School-Based Services
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