Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health

Map the landscape for child and adolescent mental health care knowledge, resources, needs, and current efforts around the globe.

• Conduct and maintain the largest multinational child and adolescent mental health survey in a representative, international sample, assessing the needs of multiple stakeholders
• Curate open databases on child and adolescent mental health needs, assessments, therapies, and disorder prevalence in Brazil and South Africa
• Build a stakeholder registry to facilitate connections between clinicians, civil society organizations, and researchers

Make training in evidence-based psychosocial interventions available to anyone, democratizing access to education in mental health care and increasing the number of lay and professional providers.

• Create a model for adapting evidence-based treatments to ensure that they work for children of diverse cultural backgrounds
• Assess the implementation of multicultural trainings to make sure treatments are actually improving children’s lives
• Build a global digital platform to train professionals across cultures and increase the capacity and number of trained professionals and lay people certified in evidence-based therapies

Build, test, and deploy new technologies to augment mental health care and research, including mobile apps, sensors, and analytical tools focused on low- and middle-income countries.

• Develop digital assessments that are reliable, multimodal in-lab, in-clinic, at-home, in-school, and in-community
• Integrate interventions into toolkits to address key symptoms using mobile apps
• Create partnerships with NGOs and other organizations to assemble a network of providers for the rapid testing of digital tools, novel psychological treatments using digital technologies, and other promising digital interventions

Share knowledge to empower the public and fight stigma.

• Serve as a credible messenger that provides reliable, valid, up-to-date knowledge and information for professional and lay audiences while empowering communities to disseminate information locally
• Create culturally adapted suites of digital resources and amplify the voice of local strategies in communities with limited accessibility to technological resources
• Launch anti-stigma campaigns informed by and in coordination with local partners to maximize impact and connection with our interventions efforts

Create innovative leadership programs for local workforce enhancement and increasing capacity to understand and treat child and adolescent mental health disorders.

• Launch three categories of fellowships to appeal to a diverse group of individuals from various sectors, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds in low- and middle-income countries:
  • Research Fellows: Develop a multinational cohort of early-career scientists representing the global leaders of tomorrow focused on innovation and implementation research
  • Clinical Fellows:  Provide specialty child and adolescent mental health training to clinicians committed to building clinical infrastructure and expanding services locally
  • Communicators: Promote the diverse activities of a group of communicators (spanning modalities, topics, and lived experience) who will focus their work on mental health needs in their region

Bring together diverse experts to synthesize knowledge and form active, collaborative communities of practice to accelerate progress in tackling the youth global mental health crisis.

• Help break down silos in the field and foster a global platform to address child and adolescent mental health needs in low- and middle-income countries
• Encourage creative minds from multiple fields to work together in pursuit of solutions for the most intractable challenges in child and adolescent mental health
• Collectively build an ambitious, diverse agenda for global child and adolescent mental health efforts