YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH
What are the key “hackable” issues of youth mental health in Belgium today?
Join us on June 6 for an Ecosystem Workshop to define together the Youth Mental Health challenge for the next Hack Healthcare event.
Next to Women’s Health, another major societal healthcare problem comes up in conversations all across the ecosystem: Youth Mental Health.
We could quote research results to you, dear reader, and show you charts and tables – but if you haven’t had a direct experience with this particular problem, just have a candid conversation with your friends who have teenage kids. It will reveal the magnitude of the problem that youth mental health is today, the multitude of facets of this problem, and how many young people, their parents, and their immediate support circle at school and specialist practitioners, live the daily struggle.
Youth Mental Health
Just as with women’s health, it’s an issue we at Hack Belgium Labs would like to do something about. And, just like with women’s health, the list of major problems around youth mental health is long:
- From diagnosed mental health disorders to the more mundane (but much more widespread) issues like anxiety, depression, eating disorders and more, the range of mental health conditions that plague the youth is very broad. The COVID years have exacerbated the situation, and there’s a marked acceleration in prevalence of youth mental health problems.
- There’s a substantial shortage of specialists across the board, from generalist psychologists to specialist pedopsychiatrists.
- Despite decades of discussions on collaboration, and recent 5-year plans with an infusion of budget, the coordination, and the effectiveness, of efforts between different actors in the mental health space (e.g. hospitals, individual psychological practices, and community organisations) is still very limited.
- Critically, it’s difficult for parents of young patients to determine which of the available providers are the most suitable to the needs of their children. Consequence: the (already limited) resources can be misallocated.
As a result, waiting time for psychological and psychiatric interventions can range from two to six months instead of the ideal 24 to 72 hours in crisis situations. Result: psychological issues have time to get substantially worse, creating a vicious circle that exacerbates the problem and affects all spheres of life of a teenager.
The obvious solution is, of course, to throw much more money at the problem. For example, in Luxembourg waiting time for mental health help is not an issue. But Belgium isn’t Luxembourg, and there simply isn’t more money available for mental health in the short term.
The other obvious solution is to dramatically increase availability and uptake of digital and digitally enabled therapies. Sadly, developing digital services for mental health isn’t exactly a quick fix either. Further, once the new digital services are available, adoption won’t be instantaneous either.
That said, building a coalition of actors willing to invest in development and adoption of effective digital mental health services (and figuring out the necessary business models, communication channels, etc.) is a task perfectly suited to Hack Healthcare. Not a simple challenge for sure, but we would have been willing to give it a go.
Fortunately, our conversations with people across the mental health landscape have offered a hint of yet another approach. Based on what we’ve learned, we would like to propose the following Hack Healthcare Challenge dedicated to Youth Mental Health:
One of the factors contributing to lengthy waiting times for mental health support is the highly fragmented, difficult to navigate landscape of mental health support in Belgium. Parents of a teenager in crisis need to understand how profound the crisis actually is, which care providers are appropriate for addressing this crisis (would a psychologist offer the right approach? Is a psychiatrist’s intervention necessary?), and secure support of the right care provider as soon as possible.
How might we develop a national tool that would help parents of young patients quickly gauge the severity of their kids’ mental health issues, identify the care path in line with their needs (and the parents’ resources), and track progress? Could we start by focusing on a very specific issue – school refusal (décrochage scolaire / schoolweigering ), and scale up the approach once there’s a viable solution?
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