Children & Youth

This Working Group was established to champion the lived experiences of young people, promote youth leadership, provide opportunities to amplify youth voices and see the actionable change in local, national and international contexts.

Our Focus

By sharing best practice knowledge to inform efforts related to child and youth mental health and bridging low-middle and high-income countries for greater equity, this working group acts as a platform for the creation of actionable opportunities across the network membership. 

Our work:

• focus on specific issues identified by the group pertaining to child and youth mental health.

• facilitate the sharing of information and knowledge about child and youth mental health organisations, programs and activities.

• facilitate collaboration and coordination between groups who share common interests.

• collaborate on new guidance on youth engagement and establishment of youth leaders in this sector.

• promote youth leadership in mental health decision-making.

Our Work

• Webinar: Youth Reimagining Leadership in Mental Health - Young people are more than beneficiaries of mental health interventions - they are experts in the programmes and circumstances that affect their own mental health. We often hear the terms youth leader, advocate, and changemaker. When are these buzzwords, and when do they hold real depth and direction? What happens when youth lead, and lead differently? On 22nd July, 2025, we turned to the experts to address these questions.

• Guide: Mental Health and Climate Change: Child & Youth at the forefront - A guide for both youth and decision-makers - The guide was developed as a report from the ECOSOC Youth Forum side event “Climate Change and Mental Health: Youth at the forefront" organized by the Child & Youth Working group at the Global Mental Health Action Network as a partnership with ASEc+ Brazil (UN ECOSOC member), Vertentes, ECOSOC and Brazil Foundation. 

• Guide: How Organisations Can Meaningfully Engage Young People in Mental Health Policy and Practice - in partnership with the MHPSS Collaborative, Global Psychology Alliance, The Being Initiative, and partners from the Psychologists Coalition at the UN, WHO Youth Council and UNICEF, this brief serves as a practical guide for civil society organisations, professional associations, foundations, and private-sector initiatives.

• Blog: Youth Voices at the UN: Reflections from the High-Level Meeting Advocacy Week - by Alexandra Romero Vidal.

• Report: Financing Child, Adolescent and Young People's Mental Health - explores the need for greater investment, the current levels of investment, what great investment can achieve, and what needs to be done to increase and improve investment in child, adolescent and young people's mental health.

Our Impact - Creating pathways to young people’s involvement in the UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs and Mental Health

The road to this year’s UN High-Level Meeting (HLM) on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) and Mental Health was a unique opportunity to make sure young people – a group typically excluded from global decision-making – were in a position to influence its outcomes. Over the last 20 years, several health issues have been prioritised on the global agenda through HLMs at the UNGA. There have been three HLMs focused on NCDs in the past, but never on mental health.

From the start, one of GMHAN’s primary aims has been to foster leadership, solidarity and activism among young people. In the run-up to the HLM, we invited young professionals to our Short-Term Action Group for mental health at the HLM to ensure their priorities were reflected in our collective global priorities. We also made sure they contributed to important meetings and events in the decision-making rooms of New York and Geneva, as well as at the WHO’s Youth Multi-Stakeholder Hearing, an event held for the first time to maximise representation from young professionals. These meetings are designed to allow young people to shape mental health and noncommunicable disease (NCD) policy.

Many of these youth partners had never attended high-level meetings before. So we worked with them to ensure they could share their perspectives, and advocate for the values and communities they care about – making sure their voices were heard, not just those of the powerful organisations which tend to dominate such forums.

Read how we created pathways to youth involvement and leadership in 2025.

Why does this all matter? The UN political declaration from the High-Level Meeting carries five times more references to children and young people than previous similar declarations, committing governments around the world to strong action on youth wellbeing.

This declaration means UN member states have committed to prioritising young people’s mental health by:

• “Integrating, as appropriate, prevention, screening, diagnosis, rehabilitation and long-term care into existing programmes for communicable diseases, maternal and child health, and sexual and reproductive health programmes.”

• “Address[ing] the health risks related to digital technology… stressing the importance of updating regulatory and educational systems to ensure that children and young people benefit from the opportunities of digital services… and are protected from the potential negative impact that digital services can have on their physical and mental health.”

• “Address[ing] the impact of misinformation and disinformation around the prevention and treatment of NCDs and mental health conditions and their risk factors… to protect especially children and young people.”

Our Impact - Effective Youth Engagement Guidelines

The Global Mental Health Action Network (GMHAN) is dedicated to elevating youth voices in mental health advocacy and positioning young people as experts within the mental health sector. Led by members of GMHAN’s Children & Youth Working Group, we published the Effective Youth Engagement Guidelines in August 2023. These guidelines are designed to equip national partners with the knowledge and skills to work meaningfully with children and young people who have lived experience of mental health issues, especially when they are accessing support.

Written in collaboration with 80 young people from 22 countries across the globe, all of whom have lived experience of mental health issues, these guidelines outline best practices and provide a true sense of what young people value in their engagement. This resource has been developed for clinicians, policymakers, funders, programme developers, researchers, educators, and anyone involved in working with young people with lived experiences of mental health conditions.

The guidelines have been a valuable resource globally, with significant reach and impact. In 2023, the document was downloaded 519 times and shared with the African Union (AU) office of the Youth Envoy. The AU has used these guidelines to develop a regional Youth Mental Health Toolkit, which has been widely distributed across the African continent and to the AU’s 55 member states. 

Highlighting the importance of this resource, Chido Mpemba, African Union Special Envoy on Youth said: "The African Union Youth Envoy is proud to have integrated the Effective Youth Engagement Guidelines into our Youth Mental Health Toolkit, particularly in informing policy initiatives. These guidelines have been instrumental in ensuring that our policy efforts prioritise meaningful youth participation, empowerment, and inclusivity. By adopting these guidelines, we have witnessed enhanced engagement, increased impact, and more effective advocacy for mental health support among young Africans. We appreciate the Global Mental Health Action Network's valuable resources and look forward to continued collaboration." Dissemination of the AU’s toolkit means guiding principles produced by the Children & Youth Working Group could indirectly benefit up to 650 million young people in the Africa aged 17 and under.

The Public Health Association of New Zealand, and our member Ronan Payinda (who is the Youth Caucus Chair of this Association), have also utilised these guidelines to develop a briefing for the Public Health Communication Centre, New Zealand. The briefing addressed the crisis in youth mental health and explored solutions to support the wellbeing of the country’s 1.6 million youth. Ronan expressed gratitude, stating: “We are grateful to the GMHAN Secretariat and the Children & Youth Working Group for guidance and support. The youth participation guidelines developed by the Global Mental Health Action Network were vital to the international scale of this Briefing.”

This collaborative effort highlights the importance of involving youth as partners in shaping mental health solutions and highlights the significant impact of GMHAN’s resources and advocacy efforts.