Investing in Children's Mental Health

The past several decades have seen remarkable improvements in several major public health issues affecting young people: smoking rates are down, traffic crash fatalities have declined, and other unintentional injuries have declined in number. Yet, similar successes have not been replicated in mental health. Why are we, as a society, failing to make needed investments in children's mental health? How can we ensure that programs with the highest levels of evidence and economic returns reach a larger fraction of the young people and families who could benefit from them?

Investing in Children's Mental Health investigates and addresses three interrelated questions:1) What are some of the best available investments to improve the mental health of children and adolescents in the United States? 2) To what extent are these investments being made? 3) What can practitioners, child-serving organizations, policymakers, and other stakeholders do to promote such investments? Daniel Eisenberg and Ramesh Raghavan open with a broad synthesis of the latest research and evidence, then introduce a series of case studies featuring interventions and programs spanning a variety of settings and age groups: home visiting programs, parenting programs, social and emotional learning (SEL) programs in schools, multisystemic therapy (MST) for troubled youth, and the Communities that Care framework for addressing youth substance use and wellbeing. The final sections distill key themes and offer recommendations for a range of stakeholders including policymakers, administrators, funders, and practitioners.

By providing a road map to overcoming the barriers to progress for youth mental health, Investing in Children's Mental Health will help push forward our society's thinking and actions regarding this ongoing population health concern.

Daniel Eisenberg is a health economist and professor at University of California, Los Angeles. His goal is to improve understanding of how to invest effectively in the mental health of young people. He is the founder and a Principal Investigator for the Healthy Minds Study, a leading national study of mental health in college populations in the U.S.

Ramesh Raghavan is a child mental health services researcher at New York University. He has led several studies on access to, and quality of, mental health services for vulnerable child populations, primarily those in the child welfare system. Dr. Raghavan earned his PhD in Health Services from the University of California, Los Angeles, his MD in Psychiatry from Kasturba Medical College, Manipal University, India, and his bachelor's degree from Stanley Medical College, Tamil Nadu Medical University, India.