Young Adult Mental Health Beyond the COVID-19 Era: Can Enlightened Policy Promote Long-Term Change?

Abstract

The status of mental health for adolescents and young adults has aptly been termed a “crisis” across research, clinical, and policy quarters. Arguably, the status quo provision of mental health services for adolescents and young adults is neither acceptable nor salvageable in its current form. Instead, only a wholesale policy transformation of mental health sciences can address crises of this scope. Pandemic-related impacts on mental health, particularly among young adults, have clearly exposed the need for the mental healthcare field to develop a set of transformative priorities to achieve long overdue, systemic changes: (1) frequent mental health tracking, (2) increased access to mental health care, (3) working with and within communities, (4) collaboration across disciplines and stakeholders, (5) prevention-focused emphasis, (6) use of dimensional descriptions over categorical pronouncements, and (7) addressing systemic inequities. The pandemic required changes in mental healthcare that can and should be the beginning of long-needed reform, calling upon all mental health care disciplines to embrace innovation and relinquish outdated traditions.