For decades, field leaders and funders have focused on developmental screening and kindergarten readiness as markers of child and family well-being. While those efforts have advanced a policy and community emphasis on Head Start, universal Pre-K, and other efforts in early education, public officials have placed much less emphasis on the critical importance of foundational…
This article from the American Academy of Pediatrics provides strategies and concrete examples to help pediatric health clinicians, schools, and other community partners work together toward youth suicide prevention efforts. Strategies include building community partnerships,
Mental Health First Aid is a training program for peers, teachers, parents, anyone who wants to know how to identify mental health issues and respond to them appropriately.
A new US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) study published in the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA Pediatrics reports significant increases in the number of children diagnosed with mental health conditions. The study, conducted by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), finds that between 2016 and 2020, the number of children ages…
Historic and modern-day policies rooted in discrimination and oppression have created and widened harmful inequities impacting many communities of color. Effectively and equitably addressing mental health requires intervening at systemic and policy levels to dismantle the structures that produce negative outcomes like generational poverty, intergenerational and cultural trauma, racism, sexism, and ableism. CLASP identified these…
These infographics from 2020 and 2021 show the widespread nature of the mental health crisis among young people and the challenges they face accessing treatment.
This blog post reviews data on young people’s mental health and outlines specific policy change recommendations, including youth mobile crisis response services, youth peer support, app- and text-based telehealth, increasing capacity of community-based organizations, culturally-responsive ACEs screening and trauma-informed care, and growing the behavioral workforce pipeline.
CLASP’s youth and young adult mental health framework calls for policies that increase access to healing, transformative mental health supports. CLASP has collaborated with partners over 2019 and 2020 to advance systems and policy changes supporting well-being for transition-age youth (ages 16-17) and young adults (ages 18-25). Through this work, they identified a set of…
This brief from CLASP offers a set of principles policymakers and other stakeholders can consider as they implement ARPA’s mental health provisions. It provides an overview of opportunities within the law to address mental health needs, and suggests immediate and longer-term policy recommendations that help to lift the longstanding barriers people of color and other…
Decades of research have demonstrated the effectiveness of social and emotional learning (SEL) for supporting students’ academics, behaviors, mental health, and long-term success. The ARP’s historic levels of K-12 dollars offer a critical opportunity to invest in a long-term foundation for evidence-based, systemic implementation of SEL that fully supports students and schools through the pandemic…