Dr. Chiara Servili and Dr. Ken Carswell of the World Health Organization (WHO) describe how the agency supports countries in improving environments and services for young people’s mental health by building systems to support prevention and care in communities and elevating youth voices to influence laws, policies, and budget decisions. Their work focuses on building intersectoral governance and accountability structures to expand mental health services that are evidence-based, adapted to local contexts, and tailored to reach vulnerable youth.

WHO’s work includes:

• Advancing national and sub-national leadership, governance, and advocacy in young people’s mental health.
• Helping governments to identify, define, implement, and monitor strategies for young people’s mental health across health, education, and youth sectors.
• Promoting collaboration between national structures and grassroots, youth-led initiatives, including those representing young people with lived experience.
• Helping countries adapt and implement evidence-based guidance on delivering quality care services through integrated service networks.
• Supporting countries to scale up integrated, multisectoral prevention approaches such as socioemotional learning, parenting and family-based support.
• Providing open-access, evidence-based tools for scalable interventions, such as Early Adolescent Skills for Emotions (EASE) and digital self-help programs, that can be adapted to different populations and delivered by non-specialists.
• Strengthening the generation and use of data and evidence to inform multisectoral service development and promote knowledge sharing within and between countries, with the engagement of young people.

Dr. Servili, who is technical lead for child and youth mental health, notes that “there is not one way to design systems that fits all contexts in terms of delivering services for child and youth mental health.” Dr. Carswell, who leads on digital innovations and psychological interventions, emphasizes the importance of ensuring that interventions are locally relevant by adapting them based on community input, local idioms, and cultural practices to help improve acceptance and effectiveness: “Maintaining open-access resources allows governments and NGOs worldwide to freely adapt and scale these tools.”

Both emphasize that effective implementation depends on intentional design and flexibility for contextualization. Dr. Carswell highlights the importance of “creative and conceptual thinking” when fitting interventions to available resources and training capacity, while Dr. Servili underscores the value of using data to identify “context-specific catalytic opportunities” where even small investments can generate lasting systemic change.

WHO’s current team works across regions and countries, as well as in collaboration with other international agencies, to promote a coherent framework for monitoring responses to young people’s mental health needs.