CALIFORNIA: Stanford creates center for youth mental health

The Almanac

The Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing is being formed to consolidate existing and new youth mental health efforts in one center, including mental health support services, suicide prevention efforts, school-based health services, community partnerships, and research. According to the center’s website, developing these services will be “a critical first step toward developing a national youth model for public mental health.” The focus will be on providing early intervention and support, mainly through creating adolescent mental health clinics that may be located in the Bay Area and across the U.S. The clinics will be based on a model used in the Australian program called “headspace,” which provides free or low-cost services related to physical and mental health, substance abuse, and work and study problems to youth ages 12–25. “Half of all mental health issues start by (age) 14 and three-quarters by the age of 24, but we really don’t have great systems that are comfortable for people to get early mental health care,” said Steven Adelsheim, a Stanford child psychiatrist and the director of the Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing. “They’re [headspace] making it comfortable if not cool to go in and get early mental health care in a less stigmatized way.”

Spark Extra! To learn more about the Australian program on which the new Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing is basing its initiative, check out headspace.