What You Can Do

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Recommendations

See below for recommendations on what you can do from the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory: “Protecting Youth Mental Health.”

To learn more about the research and recommendation basis, as well as specific examples read the full report.

Youth

  • Remember that mental health challenges are real and treatable; it doesn’t mean you are broken or that you did something wrong.
  • Ask for help.
  • Invest in healthy relationships; social connection is a powerful bugger to stress and a source of well-being.
  • Find ways to serve; volunteering in your community and helping others can build a sense of purpose.
  • Learn and practice techniques to manage stress or other difficult emotions.
  • Take care of your body and mind.
  • Be intentional about your use of social media, video games, and other technologies; how much time are you spending online? Is it taking away from healthy offline activities like exercising, seeing friends, reading, or sleeping?
  • Be a source of support for others.
  • Join the HEY! Fellowship!

Family Members & Caregivers

  • Be the best role model you can be for young people by taking care of your own mental and physical health, including taking breaks, getting enough sleep, exercising, eating balanced meals, obtaining health insurance, and unplugging from technology or social media.
  • Help children and youth develop strong, safe, and stable relationships with you and other supportive adults. This means what’s doing what is meaningful to them.
  • Encourage children and youth to build healthy social relationships with peers through self-directed play and through open conversations about their values, needs, and boundaries.
  • Do your best to provide children and youth with a supportive, stable, and predictable home and neighborhood environment. A lot may be outside of your control but try sticking to a regular and predictable daily schedule.
  • Try to minimize negative influences and behaviors in young people’s lives.
  • Ensure children and youth have regular check-ups with a pediatrician, family doctor, or other health care professional. To learn more about enrolling in Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), or a Marketplace plan, go to HealthCare.gov or InsureKidsNow.gov.
  • Look out for warning signs of distress and seek help when needed. Signs of distress include irritability, anger, withdrawal, and other changes in thoughts, appearance, performance at school, sleeping or eating patterns, or other behaviors.
  • Minimize children’s access to means of self-harm, including firearms and prescription medications.
  • Be attentive to how children and youth spend time online. Consider how much time, what content is accessible, and the impact you are observing in how children respond to using technology.
  • Be a voice for mental health in your community & talk openly with friends and family about well-being.

Educators, School Staff, and School Districts

  • Create positive, safe, and affirming school environments. 
  • Expand social and emotional learning programs and other evidence-based approaches that promote healthy development.
  • Learn how to recognize signs of changes in mental and physical health among students, including trauma and behavior changes.
  • Provide a continuum of supports to meet student mental health needs, including evidence-based prevention practices and trauma-informed mental health care.
  • Expand the school-based mental health workforce.
  • Support the mental health of all school personnel. This could include establishing realistic workloads and student-to-staff ratios, and providing competitive wages and benefits, and regularly assessing staff well-being.
  • Promote enrolling and retaining eligible children in Medicaid, CHIP, or a Marketplace plan, so that children have health coverage that includes behavioral health services.
  • Protect and prioritize students with higher needs and those at higher risk of mental health challenges, such as students with disabilities, personal or family mental health challenges, or other risk factors.

Health Care Organizations & Health Professionals

  • Recognize that the best treatment is prevention of mental health challenges.
  • Implement trauma-informed care (TIC) principles and other prevention strategies to improve care for all youth, especially those with a history of adversity
  • Routinely screen children for mental health challenges and risk factors, including adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
  • Identify and address the mental health needs of parents, caregivers, and other family members as the mental health of children and youth is closely linked to the mental health and wellbeing of their families.
  • Combine the efforts of clinical staff with those of trusted community partners and child-serving systems (e.g., child welfare, juvenile justice).
  • Build multidisciplinary teams to implement services that are tailored to the needs of children and their families.

Media Organizations, Entertainment Companies, & Journalists

  • Recognize the impact media coverage of negative events can have on the public’s mental health. The solution isn’t to hide or downplay negative news but rather to avoid misleading consumers and be more attentive to how stories are framed.
  • Normalize stories about mental health and mental illness across all forms of media, taking care to avoid harmful stereotypes, promote scientifically accurate information, and include stories of help, hope, and healing.
  • Whenever depicting suicide or suicidal ideation, adhere to best practices such as the National Recommendations for Depicting Suicide.

Social Media, Video Gaming, and Other Tech Companies

  • Prioritize user health and well-being at all stages of product development.
  • Be transparent and allow for independent researchers and the public to study the impact of company products on user health and wellbeing. This includes allowing users to provide informative data about hteir online experiences, directly providing research with disaggregated user data, and partnership with experts to analyze mental health impacts of new products in advance of rollout.
  • Build user-friendly tools that help children and adolescents engage online in healthy ways, including creating industry-wide safety standards for online health and well-being and limiting children’s exposure to harmful onling content.
  • Give users opportunities to control their online activity, including by opting out of content they may find harmful.
  • Develop products that actively safeguard and promote mental health and wellbeing.
  • Promote equitable access to technology that supports the wellbeing of children and youth. For example, donate digital technology and remote services (e.g., internet access) to under-resourced populations.

Community Organizations

  • Educate the public about the importance of mental health and reduce negative stereotypes, bias, and stigma around mental illness.
  • Implement evidence-based programs that promote healthy development, support children, youth, and their families, and increase their resilience.
  • Ensure that programs rigorously evaluate mental health-related outcomes.
  • Address the unique mental health needs of at-risk youth, such as racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ youth, systems-involved youth, and youth with disabilities.
  • Elevate the voices of children, young people, and their families; youth are experts on their own lives.

Funders & Foundations

  • Create sustained investments in equitable prevention, promotion, and early intervention.
  • Incentivize coordination across grantees and foster cross-sector partnerships to maximize reach and bring together a diversity of expertise. The scale and complexity of mental health issues among young people require collaborative approaches.
  • Scale up evidence-based interventions, technologies, and services.
  • Invest in innovative approaches and research on mental health. For example, fund participatory research that involves young people in understanding their online experiences.
  • Elevate and amplify the voices of youth and families in all stages of funding and evaluation.

Business Community

  • Provide access to comprehensive, affordable, and age-appropriate mental health care for all employees and their families, including dependent children. Research shows that parental mental health challenges not only impact their productivity in the workplace but can also affect the mental health of their children.
  • Implement policies that address underlying drivers of employee mental health challenges, including both home and workplace stressors.
  • Create a workplace culture that affirms the importance of the mental health and well-being of all employees and their families.
  • Regularly assess employees’ sense of well-being within the workplace.

Federal, State, Local & Tribal Governments

  • Address the economic and social barriers that contribute to poor mental health for young people, families, and caregivers.
  • Take action to ensure safe experiences online for children and young people.
  • Ensure all children and youth have comprehensive and affordable coverage for mental health care.
  • Support integration of screening and treatment into primary care. For example, continue expanding Pediatric Mental Health Care Access programs.
  • Provide resources and technical assistance to strengthen school-based mental health programs.
  • Invest in prevention programs, such as evidence-based social and emotional learning.
  • Expand the use of telehealth for mental health challenges.
  • Expand and support the mental health workforce.
  • Expand and strengthen suicide prevention and mental health crisis services.
  • Improve coordination across all levels of government to address youth mental health needs, including ensuring households eligible for social services and supports are receiving them.
  • Support continued reduction in biases, discrimination, and stigma related to mental health.
  • Support the mental health needs of youth involved in the juvenile justice system.
  • Support the mental health needs of youth involved in the child welfare system.

Researchers

  • Prioritize upstream data collection that centers on mental well-being and preventative factors in addition to critical mental health data.
  • Improve mental health data collection and integration to understand youth mental health needs, trends, services, and evidence-based interventions.
  • Foster public-private research partnerships.
  • Increase investments in basic, clinical, and health services research to identify treatment targets for mental health conditions and develop innovative, scalable therapies.
  • Prioritize data and research with at-risk youth populations, such as racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minority youth, individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, youth with disabilities, youth involved in the juvenile justice system, and other groups.
  • Advance dissemination and implementation science to scale up and improve compliance with evidence-based mental health practices in systems that serve children, youth, and their families.
  • Conduct research to expand understanding of social media and digital technology’s impact on youth mental health and identify opportunities for intervention.

Read the U.S. Surgeon General’s Report