Child and Adolescent Mental Health

Every child growing up in Alberta deserves to feel happy and secure. Over 80,000 young Albertans suffer from some kind of mental illness that they may struggle with for the rest of their lives.

Research activities must focus on:

• Improving access to mental health services to ensure that all children and adolescents are able to receive the help they need;
• Early intervention to treat mental illness in its early stage and help slow or prevent its progression;
• Prevention and mental health promotion to ensure that children and adolescents have the right skills and tools to deal with adverse experiences - unfortunately, more than 90 per cent of Canadian health care spending goes toward treatment rather than prevention or health promotion;
• Help for sucide and other self-harming behaviours - Aboriginal youth are particularly in crisis: suicide rates for First Nations youth are five to six times higher than for non-Aboriginal youth;
• Surveillance and data integration to measure change and combine data from all social systems.

In an effort to determine research topics of interest to both the regions and researchers, the Research Partnership's Child and Adolescent Mental Health Research Working Group conducted an environmental scan and initiated a priority-setting process. The final reports are now available online on our Partnership Publications webpage.