ur world is increasingly complex and difficult. From pandemics to the effects of climate change to the rise of technology, we are all under immense stress, but younger people are often more vulnerable than most. If we are to adapt to the complex challenges of our modern world, we must adequately support the mental health and wellbeing of young people. And yet, current mental health interventions and systems fall drastically short of meeting young people’s needs.
To meaningfully support young people’s mental health and wellbeing, we must shift away from a narrow focus on addressing symptoms toward a more holistic approach, including core dimensions such as meaning, purpose, belonging, hopefulness, and relationship to nature. Supporting young people to find wholeness within themselves and nurturing connections with others and the broader world can have transformative impacts on mental health and wellbeing. Further, these efforts would have ripple effects, stewarding a more loving, just, and sustainable future for all.
There is no one single group of actors equipped to lead such efforts alone. To collectively drive the paradigm shift younger and future generations need, we will need to harness diverse sources of creativity and wisdom by collaborating across disciplinary, generational, geographic, and other boundaries.
Transdisciplinary, Intergenerational, Cross-Cultural Collaborations
Mental health and wellbeing are subjects as old as humanity, yet the science is very new. While we have made significant progress in recent decades, fundamental questions such as “what does it mean to be human” and “how can we support human flourishing” remain excluded from mainstream research agendas and funding. We need experts from across disciplines to come together and not only contribute from their respective areas of expertise, but also to transcend usual disciplinary boundaries. The complexity of challenges in mental health and wellbeing science requires bringing together and extending discipline-specific theories and methods to create new ways of working. Further, the bounds of science need to be expanded to include sources such as ancient wisdom and lived experience. This approach to science challenges current ways of working, but is a necessary challenge.
Young people’s own creativity, wisdom, passion, and lived experience expertise are necessary ingredients for driving change. Meaningful youth engagement is on the rise and becoming a hot topic in the mental health and wellbeing field, particularly given how young people have been historically treated as passive beneficiaries. However, youth engagement is still often approached as a checkbox activity and young people are still often confined to a single role advising on mental health and wellbeing initiatives. There are countless different roles that young people can play–as researchers, implementers, advocates, facilitators, and participants to name a few. Transformative change can happen when we meaningfully support young people to play roles in leading, driving, and supporting initiatives that are distinct to their unique perspectives and capabilities, and provide spaces where they can meaningfully partner with older adults.
While youth mental health and wellbeing efforts are under-resourced in every country globally, efforts in low-middle income countries have been particularly under-resourced historically. Furthermore, even as more attention has been paid to mental health over the past decade, a lot of the support in low-middle income countries has largely been in the form of spreading Western-based approaches. This one-way flow ignores the unique insights and strengths that every community, in every culture and geography, has to offer. Further, this one-way flow ignores the transformative potential of practitioners across cultures and geographies coming together to collaborate and merge the best of what they have to offer.
My own life journey has taught me the value of listening to and connecting a diverse range of perspectives. From a childhood in India listening to the stories of refugees from Bangladesh to leveraging physics to bring multiple disciplines to bear on wicked problems in the private sector to now working with partners spanning many countries with citiesRISE, I have seen that transformative change happens when we challenge usual boundaries. This holistic, cross-boundary approach to collaboration works, as illustrated by a program adapting innovations—developed for marginalized young people in informal settlements in Nairobi—for use by LGBTQ+, immigrant, and refugee communities in Seattle.
We each have unique opportunities in our everyday work and lives to collaborate across boundaries. The more that we can support these types of collaborations, the stronger the global movement for young people’s mental health and wellbeing will be.
a global affairs media network
A More Holistic Lens to Transform Mental Health and Wellbeing
Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash
October 10, 2023
The mental health and wellbeing of global publics everywhere—and particularly for young people—are under immense stress as the world becomes increasingly complex and difficult. A more holistic approach to mental health is needed to address these growing, daunting challenges, writes Moitreyee Sinha.
O
ur world is increasingly complex and difficult. From pandemics to the effects of climate change to the rise of technology, we are all under immense stress, but younger people are often more vulnerable than most. If we are to adapt to the complex challenges of our modern world, we must adequately support the mental health and wellbeing of young people. And yet, current mental health interventions and systems fall drastically short of meeting young people’s needs.
To meaningfully support young people’s mental health and wellbeing, we must shift away from a narrow focus on addressing symptoms toward a more holistic approach, including core dimensions such as meaning, purpose, belonging, hopefulness, and relationship to nature. Supporting young people to find wholeness within themselves and nurturing connections with others and the broader world can have transformative impacts on mental health and wellbeing. Further, these efforts would have ripple effects, stewarding a more loving, just, and sustainable future for all.
There is no one single group of actors equipped to lead such efforts alone. To collectively drive the paradigm shift younger and future generations need, we will need to harness diverse sources of creativity and wisdom by collaborating across disciplinary, generational, geographic, and other boundaries.
Transdisciplinary, Intergenerational, Cross-Cultural Collaborations
Mental health and wellbeing are subjects as old as humanity, yet the science is very new. While we have made significant progress in recent decades, fundamental questions such as “what does it mean to be human” and “how can we support human flourishing” remain excluded from mainstream research agendas and funding. We need experts from across disciplines to come together and not only contribute from their respective areas of expertise, but also to transcend usual disciplinary boundaries. The complexity of challenges in mental health and wellbeing science requires bringing together and extending discipline-specific theories and methods to create new ways of working. Further, the bounds of science need to be expanded to include sources such as ancient wisdom and lived experience. This approach to science challenges current ways of working, but is a necessary challenge.
Young people’s own creativity, wisdom, passion, and lived experience expertise are necessary ingredients for driving change. Meaningful youth engagement is on the rise and becoming a hot topic in the mental health and wellbeing field, particularly given how young people have been historically treated as passive beneficiaries. However, youth engagement is still often approached as a checkbox activity and young people are still often confined to a single role advising on mental health and wellbeing initiatives. There are countless different roles that young people can play–as researchers, implementers, advocates, facilitators, and participants to name a few. Transformative change can happen when we meaningfully support young people to play roles in leading, driving, and supporting initiatives that are distinct to their unique perspectives and capabilities, and provide spaces where they can meaningfully partner with older adults.
While youth mental health and wellbeing efforts are under-resourced in every country globally, efforts in low-middle income countries have been particularly under-resourced historically. Furthermore, even as more attention has been paid to mental health over the past decade, a lot of the support in low-middle income countries has largely been in the form of spreading Western-based approaches. This one-way flow ignores the unique insights and strengths that every community, in every culture and geography, has to offer. Further, this one-way flow ignores the transformative potential of practitioners across cultures and geographies coming together to collaborate and merge the best of what they have to offer.
My own life journey has taught me the value of listening to and connecting a diverse range of perspectives. From a childhood in India listening to the stories of refugees from Bangladesh to leveraging physics to bring multiple disciplines to bear on wicked problems in the private sector to now working with partners spanning many countries with citiesRISE, I have seen that transformative change happens when we challenge usual boundaries. This holistic, cross-boundary approach to collaboration works, as illustrated by a program adapting innovations—developed for marginalized young people in informal settlements in Nairobi—for use by LGBTQ+, immigrant, and refugee communities in Seattle.
We each have unique opportunities in our everyday work and lives to collaborate across boundaries. The more that we can support these types of collaborations, the stronger the global movement for young people’s mental health and wellbeing will be.
