Promoting youth mental health through stakeholder-generated innovation

This community-engaged, mixed-methods study aimed to understand stakeholders’ perceptions of strategies for promoting youth mental health using an innovation tournament. Stakeholders – including youth (aged 13 years and older), parents, and mental healthcare professionals – were first invited to nominate ideas for promoting youth mental health. Fifteen stakeholders nominated 46 ideas related to educating (46%), managing quality (26%), planning (17%), restructuring (15%), attending to the policy context (11%), and financing (9%). Stakeholders were then invited to rate the importance and feasibility of these ideas. Stakeholders rated all ideas to be very to extremely important and moderately to extremely feasible. Youth, parents, and mental healthcare professionals all rated ideas related to financing as the most important, albeit relatively less feasible. Mental healthcare professionals generally rated ideas to be less feasible than parents and other community stakeholders. Findings highlight the perceived importance of financing strategies in addressing the ongoing youth mental health crisis and suggest alignment of mental health priorities across stakeholders.