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Tackling Children and Young People’s Mental Health

30 January 2025

Professors Essi Viding and Argyris Stringaris (Pro-Vice Provosts, Mental Health & Wellbeing) discuss the urgent need to address the growing mental health crisis among young people, and highlight the impactful initiatives UCL is undertaking to make a difference.

Children playing as sun sets

Monday 3rd February marks the beginning of Children’s Mental Health Week, an initiative launched in 2025 by the charity Place2Be. This week is dedicated to empowering, equipping, and giving a voice to all children and young people across the UK. In this short blog, Prof Essi Viding and Prof Argyris Stringaris (Pro-Vice Provosts, Mental Health & Wellbeing) discuss the urgent need to address the growing mental health crisis among young people and highlight the impactful initiatives UCL is undertaking to make a difference.

Understanding the Current Landscape of Children and Young People's Mental Health 

Mental health conditions are now the leading cause of disability among children and young people globally, according to the World Health Organisation. Because many of these conditions start in childhood and become chronic, they can ultimately lead to negative outcomes, including suicide and premature death. Prevention, early intervention, and long-term support are critical to reducing these risks.

Unfortunately, interventions for mental health problems in children and young people have remained stagnant for decades. This is partly due to our limited understanding of the causes of mental health problems, as well as the processes by which interventions work. Unlike disorders with a single cause, mental health disorders emerge as a result of multiple biological, familial and societal/environmental factors, and their interplay over time. This means that we need to work across disciplines to generate the transformations in interventions that are desperately needed to address the growing mental health crisis.

How UCL is Making a Difference

UCL’s Grand Challenge of Mental Health and Wellbeing’s mission is ‘to transform prevention and early intervention in mental health and wellbeing through cross-disciplinary research and practice’. To achieve this mission, we need crossdisciplinary collaborations in order to:

  • Find out how interventions work
  • Establish for whom interventions work
  • Identify the social and cultural barriers for delivering treatments

UCL, with its academic excellence across diverse disciplines in both humanities and sciences, is uniquely positioned to accelerate improvements in children and young people’s mental health. UCL’s Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing supports cross-disciplinary pump-priming projects that support both blue skies and more applied research. We are already seeing some exciting findings from early projects and look forward to these impacts and projects scaling up to larger research programmes attracting external funding. 

We are forging exciting partnerships with our local NHS and local authority partners to test a model of delivering experimental interventions at NHS and community settings, with potential to reduce disorder escalation and relapse.

Closer to home, we are working together with professional services teams across UCL to ensure our student mental health and wellbeing services are sector leading. We are developing and evaluating new preventative programmes aimed at equipping students with skills to make most out of their life at university and beyond, and ensuring that UCL’s university clinic also has provision for our students with neurodiversity. 

Ultimately, the Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing aims to help make the most of UCL’s extraordinary richness in research and scholarship by working across disciplines. Children and young people’s mental health stands to benefit from this endeavour.