Young people’s mental health

The importance of dealing with the crisis in young people’s mental health means that NPC is currently looking at whether we can raise the profile of the issue and possible solutions through our think tank work.

NPC has a long history of working on young people’s mental health—our first report into this issue was published in 2008. This report highlighted the importance of early intervention, but also how little money is spent on young people’s mental health services compared to adult mental health services.

Read our June 2024 report on the youth mental health crisis, which looks at ​​how charities coping with a rise in children and young people seeking mental health support.

Our work with philanthropists

Since then we have advised many philanthropists on this. But in recent years, as waiting lists for mental health has risen, the difference that philanthropists can make has changed. There are over 400,000 children waiting to be seen by CAHMS. This has knock-on effects on other areas such as education, as young people are missing from school, and rehabilitation, as more young people with mental health problems are being sent to prison. Over the same time period, digital apps as a way of helping young people are gaining traction and NPC wrote reports in 2019 and 2021 on digital mental health services.

Through our consulting work we are advising a number of philanthropists who fund in this area. Some of our clients are funding interventions that are being run by schools; others are looking to help adult mental health adapt their services for young people. We are currently working with one philanthropist to update our work on digital mental health applications, to answer the question about where hybrid interventions are needed and where digital ones work well. We have also been working on our Signpost+ project to make it easier for young people to find good quality interventions.

What we are working on

We know that complexity in the system makes it difficult for funders to know where to put their funding.  So, we are exploring the mental health system for young people to understand what would be of interest to philanthropists when funding mental health initiatives for young people.