Across OECD countries, the mental health of children, adolescents and young people has emerged as a pressing and complex policy challenge. This report provides comprehensive cross‑country assessments to date of the trends, drivers and policy responses related to the mental health of young people under 25 in OECD countries, and presents clear evidence that youth mental health has been declining over the past decade. The COVID‑19 pandemic accelerating the youth mental health crisis, but the underlying declining trends already visible in many countries much earlier. While the scale and nature of this decline vary across OECD Members, the pattern is consistent: more young people now report that they are experiencing symptoms of anxiety, depression and psychological distress than previous generations.
This report adds to a growing body of OECD analysis showing that mental health is a foundation for individual well‑being, social participation and economic prosperity. The report follows and complements earlier reports including A New Benchmark for Mental Health Systems (2021) and Fitter Minds, Fitter Jobs (2021), which highlighted the substantial personal, social and economic costs of poor mental health, as well as the critical need to redesign mental health systems to be more preventive, more accessible and better integrated across services and sectors. This report also supports the implementation of the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Integrated Mental Health, Skills, and Work Policy, adopted by all OECD Members in 2015. The Recommendation calls on governments to promote mental health from early childhood onwards, detect and address problems early, and ensure strong links between health, social, education and employment systems. The findings in this report underline the urgency of those objectives; when young people are in poorer mental health they struggle more at school, find it harder to transition from school to the labour market, and are more likely to claim social benefits. The findings of this report clearly confirm the importance of cross-sectoral approaches to support young people’s mental resilience.
This report is also a reminder that young people today are navigating an increasingly complex environment characterised by intersecting and mutually reinforcing pressures, including the impacts of digitalisation and social media, which have transformed how young people communicate, learn and access information. As shown in How’s Life for Children in the Digital Age? (2025), digital technologies offer important opportunities for connection and learning, but can also expose young people to risks related to excessive use, harmful content, online bullying and sleep disruption. The evidence shown in this report echoes those findings; while digital environments can support well‑being, their design and use patterns matter, and some young people are more vulnerable than others. Beyond the digital sphere, broader socio-economic and societal challenges, including economic insecurity, academic pressure, climate anxiety and global turbulence and conflicts, are weighing on the well-being of young people. These stressors do not operate in isolation, rather they accumulate and interact in ways that contribute to a sustained and widespread decline in youth mental health across most OECD countries.
Addressing the youth mental health crisis requires a multi‑sectoral and preventive approach that goes well beyond specialist mental health services. This report, as well as in earlier OECD work such as Mental Health Promotion and Prevention (2025), highlights the importance of strengthening social and emotional learning in schools, promoting mental health literacy, supporting families, ensuring safe and inclusive digital environments, and expanding access to low‑threshold, holistic and peer‑supported services. Countries will also need to take seriously the upstream drivers of youth mental distress including economic insecurity and widening inequalities and respond in ways that give young people confidence and hope for the future. While increasing access to mental health services cannot be the only policy response to the crisis, it is nonetheless an important aspect with experts stating near-unanimously that the level of mental health support in their countries is too low. Services that are low-threshold, easy to access, holistic and include peer-to-peer interactions are a priority for widespread implementation.
Finally, the report calls for more robust, timely and comparable data to guide policy action. Today, fewer than one‑third of OECD countries collect regular, nationally representative data on young people’s mental health. Without such information, it is difficult to track trends, assess the impacts of emerging policies – including policies such as school phone bans and age‑based social media limits – or design effective prevention and support strategies.
This report aims to support OECD countries in strengthening their response to stemming the declining trend in youth mental health. Ensuring that young people can thrive, both today and in adulthood, is essential for building more resilient, equitable and prosperous societies.