Youth Mental Health in a Changing World

Setting the Standard With Brave Buddies

Our Brave Buddies^® intensive program, offered multiple times throughout the year, offers 1:1 staff-to-child ratios, family support, and real-life practice with “brave talking” for children with selective mutism. The Child Mind Institute has evaluated more children with selective mutism than any other center worldwide.

This year, we served four cohorts of children from around the country and the world. Molly’s family traveled all the way from New Zealand to get treatment they couldn’t access anywhere else — and recently, Molly gave her first-ever presentation in school, something that once felt impossible. “Children are recovering from selective mutism with this treatment,” says Molly’s mom, Victoria. “Above all else, this is the treatment that is getting real results.”

Building On a Flagship ADHD Program

Now in its 10th year, our ADHD Summer Program is intentionally different. This therapeutic program for children ages 5 to 10 has a 1:1 staff-to-child ratio and is highly structured, with clear routines, consistent expectations, and continuous guidance throughout the day. In 2025, we served our largest cohort to date and expanded to launch our new ADHD & Behavior After-School Program. This 10-week program is designed to provide support to children and parents during the school year.

This year, the ADHD Summer Program also went beyond its core clinical programming, launching a novel partnership with our research teams. Of our 2025 cohort, 40% participated in an innovative actigraphy research study, wearing GENEActiv devices that tracked physical activity and sleep throughout the program. The study deepened our understanding of ADHD-related behavioral patterns and daily rhythms — an example of how research and data help our clinical programming grow and evolve.

A National Destination for Training

The Child Mind Institute is committed to cultivating the next generation of mental health professionals. In March, our externship program participated in the NYNJADOT-PSYDNYS Consortium Match. We completed the match in record time and filled all 13 externship spots across our six clinical tracks.

These externs joined a growing class of trainees, including five Postdoctoral Fellows, three Predoctoral Interns, and seven undergraduate Clinical Summer Interns. Each of these early-career mental health professionals was selected from hundreds of impressive applications, underscoring our training programs’ strong appeal and caliber.

Preparing to Cut the Ribbon at the Bubrick Center

In 2024, our community experienced the sudden loss of Dr. Jerry Bubrick, director of the Intensive Pediatric OCD Service and senior psychologist in the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute. Throughout 2025, we worked to formalize and expand services for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder into a distinct center at the Child Mind Institute in his memory. With doors opening in early 2026, the Bubrick Center for Pediatric OCD will be led by Theresa Welles, PhD, and will expand access to clinical care, train the next generation of OCD clinical specialists, and fuel research and innovation within this high-need area. The Bubrick Center will stand as a testament to Dr. Bubrick’s pioneering work in the field and further his vision that every child live a fulfilling, joyful life.

Training the Next Generation of Mental Health Leaders

More than half of children in the United States live in a designated mental health professional shortage area. And while Black and Hispanic individuals make up nearly one-third of the U.S. population, they represent only about 10% of mental health professionals. Our Youth Mental Health Academy aims to change that.

This 14-month training program recruits talented high school students from marginalized communities who are interested in pursuing a career in the mental health field. We’ve now trained more than 2,400 young people at 19 sites across California. One hundred percent of surveyed graduating seniors from our first cohort have been accepted to and enrolled in college — where the majority have now declared majors in fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and premed.

Letting Teens Know: You Are Okay

According to the CDC, 42% of high school students report feeling persistently sad or hopeless. Yet when it comes to topics like mental health, relationships, and substance use, it can be hard to talk to parents — and unreliable or risky to get information or advice from the internet, chatbots, or social media.

That’s the foundation of You Are Okay, a resource hub for teens and young adults that started as the passion project of writer, performer, and mental health advocate Jenny Jaffe. Built in partnership with young people, guided by the same values as our Family Resource Center, and relaunched in 2025, it’s a place for young people to get answers, find words for what they’re going through, and get help if they need it.

A Toolkit for College-Bound Students

In August, we released our College Readiness Toolkit, designed to help students transition to and succeed in college, in partnership with Oak Foundation. The toolkit combines evidence-based strategies with practical guidance for students and parents.

Organized into four sections — Things to Know Before You Go, Body Regulation Basics, The Grind, and Achieving Your Vision — it covers executive function skills, coping strategies, and problem-solving tools. A dedicated parent section offers support for families during the transition to college. Available online in English and Spanish, the toolkit aims to ensure every student has a fair shot at success. It’s been viewed over half a million times, with more than 20% of views in Spanish.

Integrating Mental Health Care During Sickle Cell Treatment

What if the parents and caregivers of chronically sick children could receive world-class care not only for their physical health, but also their mental health? That’s exactly what our School and Community Programs team made possible when they kicked off a new partnership with the Pediatric Sickle Cell Disease Care program at New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. The Child Mind Institute provided training to the Child Life and medical staff for integrating trauma-informed mental health support in their services for families.

2nd Annual Staten Island Youth Mental & Behavioral Health Symposium

In May 2025, the School and Community Programs team joined the 2nd Annual Staten Island Youth Mental & Behavioral Health Symposium, where they led interactive, skills-based workshops designed to equip educators with practical tools to support student mental health and foster safer, more supportive school environments.

Our team presented practical strategies for helping teens manage emotions, provided insight into the developing brains of younger children, and shared immediately applicable techniques for educators.

Mirror: Responsible AI, Lifesaving Results

In 2025, the Child Mind Institute launched Mirror, our new AI-powered journaling app. Designed to support mental health through guided reflection and real-time insights, Mirror provides a private, secure space to record thoughts and feelings as written reflections, voice or video recordings, or via our mood-tracking interface. Simultaneously, it includes built-in safety features that can detect signs of risk and connect users to support when needed. The impact has already been lifesaving, with over 4,500 young people connected in real time to crisis support, suicide hotlines, or 911.

Treating Depression With Kandoo

One of the biggest barriers to treating youth depression is getting kids to engage with their care. Only about half of young people complete the “homework” aspect of traditional Brief Behavioral Activation therapy (BBA), which centers on tracking participants’ moods before and after engaging in real-world activities. That’s why we built Kandoo, a new app for BBA developed with funding from the State of California. Kandoo supports clinicians by offering interactive features to boost engagement and gamify mood tracking. Clinicians get real-time insights into patient progress, and patients can engage with map-based gameplay — making treatment more dynamic and even fun.

Forging a Path to the DSM for DVSD

Amy Margolis, PhD, and the NVLD Innovation Core at the Child Mind Institute are collaborating with Prudence Fisher, PhD, to lead the effort to add Developmental Visual-Spatial Disorder (DVSD, a reconceptualization of nonverbal learning disability, or NVLD) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5TR).

DVSD is a proposed neurodevelopmental disorder that has historically been underdiagnosed and underresearched. Inclusion in the DSM would help clinicians identify it sooner and provide better treatment for children.

To support this advancement, the team recently finished collecting data for a field trial testing the DVSD criteria set, and the DVSD screener is being validated using data from over 1,000 young people participating in the Healthy Brain Network study. These findings are informing new diagnostic tools and the expansion of our digital symptom checker. The NVLD Innovation Core is generously funded by Laura Lemle, PhD, and The NVLD Project.

Driving Discovery Through Citizen Science

In 2025, the Child Mind Institute continued to grow our citizen science initiatives. We launched several challenges on Kaggle, a platform where data scientists collaborate and compete to solve real-world problems. Our Detect Behavior with Sensor Data competition, which asked participants to use information from our Helios wrist-worn devices to distinguish between body-focused repetitive behaviors like hair pulling and everyday actions like adjusting glasses, received over 75,000 submissions. We also collaborated to host the 2025 Women in Data Science (WiDS) Global Datathon, which charged participants with building a model that uses brain imaging to help diagnose ADHD.

On Curious (formerly MindLogger), our open-source platform for building and delivering digital mental health tools, we engaged young people through the 10-Minute Challenge in partnership with the California Department of Health Care Services’ Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. Students across California designed brief, scalable interventions to promote healthier technology use by and for young people.

Our Global Youth Advisory Council

A critical part of the SNF Global Center’s mission is to amplify youth voices and invest in next-generation leaders. Our Global Youth Advisory Council anchors youth involvement across initiatives at the international level. Two representatives from each member country’s Youth Council act as a bridge between local contexts and global strategy, allowing for more grounded implementation and connecting local actions to broader initiatives.

“The power of young people lies in our diversity — different stories and cultures, one shared mission to create better communities,” says Delice Lumbu, Co-Director of Youth Engagement. “We’re using our voices to shape the systems we’ll inherit.”

First-Ever Global Summit on Youth Mental Health

During United Nations General Assembly week in September, the SNF Global Center hosted the inaugural Global Summit on Youth Mental Health, convening young leaders from several countries — including Brazil, South Africa, and Greece — as well as international experts in child and adolescent mental health care. Under the theme “The Digital Dilemma: Bridging Science and Storytelling for Youth Mental Health,” the day featured discussions on grassroots youth leadership, reimagining digital connectivity for positive mental health, and ensuring young people have a voice in shaping mental health policy and systems.

Third Annual Expert Gathering in Cape Town

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute hosted its third annual Expert Gathering in Cape Town, South Africa. Led by our South Africa Youth Council and held in partnership with the South African Medical Research Council, the two-day event’s theme was “Beyond the Table: Youth as Co-Creators in Change for Mental Health.”

More than 100 participants — including government partners, clinicians, researchers, NGOs, funders, and youth leaders from all over the world — came together to explore what’s working in global youth mental health, where gaps remain, and what’s needed next. The gathering concluded with a powerful Youth Council report calling for clearer communication of research, culturally and linguistically relevant tools, and stronger community-based supports for young people.

Expanding Our MoBI Labs Globally

Since 2014, our Multimodal Brain/Body Imaging Laboratory (MoBI) has supported the assessment of more than 8,780 children through the Healthy Brain Network, helping them get accurate mental health diagnoses while building datasets that transform our understanding of the developing brain. Unlike traditional neuroimaging approaches that rely on expensive MRI scanners and require children to remain motionless in confined spaces, MoBI uses portable and wearable sensors, including EEG, eye tracking, motion capture, wrist-worn activity monitors, and physiological measures, to capture brain and body data in more natural settings. This approach is lower cost, more scalable, more inclusive of diverse participants, and better suited to real-world deployment in resource-limited settings.

Now, with support from the SNF Global Center, MoBI is expanding internationally by building new labs in South Africa and Brazil, adapting tools to local languages and cultures, and partnering with community organizations to reach underserved populations. The result will be more diverse datasets that better represent the approximately one in seven children worldwide affected by a mental health or learning disorder.

Judges at the Forefront of Youth Mental Health

Our Child and Adolescent Mental Health Initiative’s (CAMHI) training programs are designed to support professionals and individuals working with children and adolescents in Greece. Each program is tailored to a specific audience — including educators, psychologists, child psychiatrists, social workers, parents and caregivers, pediatricians, judicial officials, prosecutors, and staff in childcare institutions. Our programs provide targeted knowledge and practical tools to help strengthen their ability to support young people.

This programming includes trainings for aspiring and practicing judicial professionals at the National School of Judges (ESDi), focused on educating and supporting them in effectively and sensitively addressing the challenges they face in their duties with children, adolescents, and families. To date, we have trained 132 ESDi students prior to their graduations, as well as provided continuing education to 1,274 active judges and prosecutors.

A Look Ahead to LUMI

Today, there is still no single youth mental health assessment system that is globally consistent, culturally adaptable, and freely accessible. As a result, many children and adolescents — especially in underresourced communities — are overlooked or unable to access the right support. Systems struggle to compare data, identify needs early, and make informed decisions about treatment and prevention.

Our response is the Library of Universal Mental Health Instruments (LUMI): an open-access library of mental health assessments designed for young people, families, providers, researchers, and schools around the world. This globally developed and tested ecosystem helps identify more than 30 mental health disorders and areas of functioning through a scientifically rigorous yet culturally responsive approach. Co-developed with more than 300 international experts, clinicians, researchers, linguists, and youth advisors, LUMI creates a shared language for youth mental health across countries and communities while respecting local context and culture. In the coming year, LUMI will become freely available in more than 12 languages for schools, clinics, researchers, and communities worldwide, while also being integrated into national health and education systems in Greece, Brazil, and South Africa.