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In this episode, host Jade Hunter is joined by UCL's Pro-Vice Provosts for Mental Health & Wellbeing to discuss the findings of a significant new survey conducted in partnership with YouGov.
In this episode of Disruptive Voices, host Jade Hunter is joined by Professors Essi Viding and Argyris Stringaris to discuss the findings of a significant new survey conducted in partnership with YouGov. This survey, which gathered responses from 1,545 young adults aged 16 to 25, sheds light on the pressing mental health challenges faced by young people across Britain.
This episode delves into the survey's key insights, exploring the perceptions of mental health support and the urgent need for effective early intervention and prevention strategies. Essi and Argyris discuss the implications of the findings, including the high percentage of young individuals seeking help and the dissatisfaction with current support systems.
The episode also highlights UCL's commitment to improving mental health services through interdisciplinary approaches, uniting expertise from various fields to tackle these complex challenges - listen for a roadmap for future research and initiatives aimed at enhancing the wellbeing of young people.
Featured in this episode:
- Host: Jade Hunter – Coordinator, UCL’s Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing
With special thanks to our guests: - Professor Essi Viding and Professor Argyris Stringaris – UCL Pro Vice Provosts for Mental Health and Wellbeing
Resources:
- Full survey results published by YouGov
- UCL news story
- UCL’s Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing
- Professor Argyris Stringaris’s academic profile
- Professor Essi Viding’s academic profile
Disruptive Voices is a podcast from UCL Grand Challenges, proudly produced by Decibelle Creative / @decibelle_creative.
Transcript
Jade: Hello and welcome to Disruptive Voices from UCL Grand Challenges. I'm Jade Hunter, your host and coordinator for UCL's Grand Challenge of Mental Health and Wellbeing. In today's episode, we're diving into the findings from a major new survey conducted in partnership with YouGov, offering fresh insights into young people's experiences of mental health difficulties across Britain. Between 13 June and 7 July 2025, we heard from 1,545 young adults aged 16 to 25 about the challenges they face, the support they've received and what they believe needs to change. We'll explore the key drivers of poor mental health, how different forms of support are perceived and what young people want from future services and research. The survey revealed just how widespread mental health difficulties are, underlining the urgent need for more research and evidence based support focused on early intervention and prevention. These insights will be especially important for the Grand Challenge as we work towards developing a hub designed to harness UCL's cross disciplinary expertise in this area.
With rising mental health needs, effective interventions are more important than ever. The hub will unite world class research in neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology with expertise from fields as diverse as architecture, law, education and sociology to tackle the complex challenge of improving mental health and wellbeing. Joining me to unpack the survey findings and to discuss why prevention and early intervention are so crucial for young people's mental Health are UCL's Pro Vice Provost for Mental Health and Wellbeing, Professor Essi Viding and Professor Argiris Stringaris. So Essi, can we begin with you? What prompted this survey and why was it important to hear directly from young people?
Essi Viding: Well, we all know that young people's mental health is receiving a lot of attention and together with Algeris, we have been arguing for the importance of prevention and early intervention as well as improving our understanding of what sort of help works for whom. And we wanted to use this survey to take a temperature from the young people, to get a sense of who may be struggling and whether they are getting help.
Jade: That's brilliant and, argyrous. From your perspective, what stood out most in the findings? Were there any surprises or anything that was particularly striking?
Argyris Stringaris: Yeah, so I think the first thing that is important to say is that, this survey, is not diagnostic and whilst it is, you know, There were over 1,500 young people involved, that it is still by comparison to other epidemiological studies, on the smaller side. So we need to remember that when we interpret the findings, plus we've made all the people who did the survey made a big effort for it to be representative of the population of the uk. But again, there are constraints to this. So when we interpret the findings of this study, we need to bear these things in mind and remember that it is a cross sectional survey, so it is a snapshot, here. So the thing that to me stood out the most, given all these considerations, is that, people not only said that they had lots of difficulties, so there were people who said, that they would seek help, they're likely to seek help soon. It was about 30% of the people and in some, age groups and gender groups it was higher. So it was higher in women and higher in young people. So I think that is quite an important statement because it's in the here and now and has implications both in terms of our understanding of how people feel, how they perceive their health to be or their mental health specifically, but also what their intentions are, what they are likely to do and therefore it has public health implications. It tells us, well, these people are likely to want to enter the system at some level, be it at the GP or be it at, child, adolescent or young, ah, adult mental health, service or in more informal ways. Understanding that is very important. So I think that was very helpful to see.
Jade: That's really interesting. And Essie, from your perspective, what were your key takeaways from the findings?
Essi Viding: Well, I think it was sad to see that, many young people were unhappy with the help that they were giving, probably partly because there is often a long wait. But I think it's also important to remember that we do not currently know to what extent the rise in mental health problems reflect a genuine increase, to what extent it is a case of mental health awareness campaigns, which we've had a lot of in the past decade, having improved people's ability to recognise mental health problems and to seek help and to what extent we are seeing potentially harmful effects of mental health awareness efforts in pathologizing inevitable stress and distress that is part of normal human life. And research is beginning to look at this and suggest that all three may be true to an extent. And I think this really urges us to get better at identifying who really needs help at, what kind. And also to provide young people with tools to handle everyday stresses, disappointments and distress in a resilient way. And this needs to be done very collaboratively with the young people. And in my experience, young people are very invested in coming up with creative solutions and we do need creative Solutions because the current health service is not able to accommodate the degree of need that is being expressed at the moment.
Jade: And do you see that when you say it's something that's collaborative, do you see that as collaborative with young people or with other providers or other institutions as well as both?
Essi Viding: I think it's important to work together with different service providers. But I think young people are a key to the solution. They are creative, they know what they or they have ideas of what works for them, what doesn't work for them, what they find palatable, what they don't find palatable. And I think it needs to be done collaboratively so that people actually test services when they are provided.
Jade: Thinking about UCL's grand challenge of mental health and wellbeing, how does this work align with our broader goals?
Argyris Stringaris: Yeah, so there are a few things here. So remember that the goals of the grand challenges are to improve interventions and accelerate interventions, particularly interventions that allow us to understand the mechanisms, the how things work for people and for different people as well. And the how can be very much basic science. It could be molecules that help us understand why treatment, say pharmacological, a drug treatment works or it could go as far as being social mechanisms. So what can we change in society that would allow us to, that would help us improve people's mental health and well being. And we focus on two things. We focus on early intervention and prevention. So and these two things can go hand in hand. So we want to prevent things from happening or if they have happened, make sure that we intervene early enough to prevent them from becoming big problems. and in order to achieve this grand challenges, UCL grand challenges, m operate and this is a core part of our strategy in what we call an interdisciplinary or cross disciplinary way. So instead of saying well this is just the domain of, I don't know, psychology or psychiatry that we say well we actually need to bring people together from various different disciplines, and try to solve these problems. So as I said again corresponding to what I was describing before, these can be basic scientists for example, or they can be architects or they can be lawyers, and working together with what would typically be mental health, researchers, psychologists and psychiatrists for example and educationalists in order to improve interventions. And we have some very concrete examples in the work that we have been doing and facilitating with essi, with my colleague Professor Viding.
Jade: Essi, is there anything you would expand on in relation to those Projects for example.
Essi Viding: So I can perhaps give a few concrete examples of the kinds of things that we've done. So we have formed a partnership with our local NHS provider and we are trialling social prescribing for young people who have received some treatment in NHS for often anxiety or depression but who we would ideally want to prevent from re entering NHS services if at all possible. So we are providing opportunities to do supported social activities and seeing whether that kind of connecting with other people and different activities may make a difference in stopping somebody coming back to the services and would improve their well being and mental health. We've also funded seed projects that improve our understanding of these biological and social mechanisms that Archeris has been talking about. So examples would be projects that look at the impact of built environment on mood and stress as well as genetic studies that help us understand if we can repurpose existing drugs to treat mental health conditions efficiently. So this is all very novel work and often work that is high risk and might not in the first instance be funded by research councils. But if we can get some activity going and show a proof of principle then there is hope that this will be funded at larger scale and will provide us with new solutions and creative solutions or both treatment but also prevention of mental health problems. We're also working together with different services within our own university to improve our provision for student well being and student mental health. So there is an NHS clinic within our university that is treating students who have frank mental health difficulties and we also pioneering new ways in which we can promote well being and prevent mental health problems.
Essi Viding: emerging in students including providing them with skills to manage stress and their well being and also looking into impact of exercise on mental health and wellbeing in our own student population.
Jade: That's brilliant. So it's really wide ranging and really sort of stretching across the university.
Esi Viding: I think that's important. Mental health. I think it's important J ah that as Argus has been talking about, mental health problems are multifactorial. They are not usually a product of one single thing having gone wrong. So this is why we need solutions that are varied. It's not going to be a one jacket fits all approach.
Jade: Okay, that's great. And so finally what's next? How do we build upon this work?
Argyris Stringaris: I think we have a lot to focus on in terms of the projects that we have going and we have the first very exciting results from some of these projects and that's very Reassuring. We have also some of these projects, have also brought external funding, so more money to be doing yet bigger studies. Because as I was saying at the very beginning, all else being equal, the bigger the study, the more comprehensive it is, the more different people, it can involve, the better. And the. An important thing to consider here is that apart from the scientific success, we also need to make sure that we get in mental health to a, level of funding that is at least comparable to what we have for conditions like cancer. your listeners, our listeners will be very interested to know that there is a huge asymmetry, there is a huge gap between the amount of money that you can get from philanthropists or private people from organisations from the state for things like cancer, which are rare in young people, compared to what is very, very common, which is mental health issues. And this is an inequity that is hard to understand if you think about it properly and should be changed. Most important, because we need to know how many people actually really need treatment and what treatment they require. And I think that process is part of our strategy. We want to convince people that we can do and are doing great work. When I say we, all the people at UCL who have been doing this brilliant science, but that gets supported appropriately, in the next few years. So this is part, it's a core part of the strategy, to persuade people on that and show the value of doing this research and actually in the long run the cost saving that it can lead to, both in terms of kind of pounds, but perhaps most importantly in terms of years lived in disability. I don't know whether we said this at the beginning, but mental health problems are the leading cause of, of disability, of years lived in disability amongst young people. So why is that? This needs to change and we can change it. And that's, I think a very important point.
Essi Viding: I completely agree. And this is also one of the reasons why Argyris and I, together with excellent colleagues at ucl, are striving to establish a hub for research and research translation, to really, really up the game in understanding the causes of mental health difficulties in children and young people. And we are looking for partners who can donate to this endeavour so that we can start the programme of research going. And we will obviously also be seeking Research Council funding for this enterprise.
Jade: That's brilliant. Thank you so much. Thank you both for joining me today and for sharing your reflections on this important work. You've been listening to Disruptive Voices, a podcast from UCL Grand Challenges. This episode was presented by me, Jade Hunter, produced by Decibel Creative and edited by Annabelle Buckland at Decibel Creative. If you'd like to hear m more thought provoking conversations from Disruptive Voices, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. To explore more about UCL Grand Challenges, including our latest news, events and research, just Google UCL Grand Challenges.