Gill Attrill, Director of the UKRI Adolescence, Mental Health and Developing Mind, initiative shares her thoughts for World Mental Health Day 2024
This World Mental Health Day, the theme of prioritising mental health in the workplace has real resonance for us at the UKRI’s Adolescence, Mental Health and Developing Mind initiative. We’re all too aware of the links between poor mental health in adolescence and worse employment.
Earlier this year, the Resolution Foundation published worrying data on how young people in their 20s are more likely to be out of work due to poor mental health than those in their early 40s. Young people struggling with their mental health are more likely to be out of work than their healthy peers, with non-graduates particularly disadvantaged in the labour market.
It’s clear that poor mental health in adolescence can cast a long shadow over young people’s job prospects and opportunities.
So how is our programme – a £35m investment in research into young people’s mental health - responding to these challenges?
To tackle a problem, we need to understand it in detail. Some of our projects are helping us to understand more about the complex relationships that underpin young people’s life trajectories.
To give a few examples, the ATTUNE project are using creative and scientific methods to look at how young people’s experiences of adversity relate to their mental health. ReThink are exploring the processes that drive mental health and wellbeing for young people with experience of the care system, particularly as they move into adulthood and the world of further and higher education, training and work. The links between care experience and unemployment are not inevitable - with the right support care-experienced young people can thrive and the team are exploring why some young people struggle more or less, and how to provide better help
It’s also really important to map out the implications that poor mental health has for young people’s future employment and wider lives, and the benefits which good support and interventions can bring. Professor Richard Cookson’s team are doing exactly this, developing a computer programme that can predict better the long-term consequences and public cost impacts of short-term effects on adolescent health and wellbeing.
It’s this kind of insight that helps to strengthen the case for investing in interventions that can impact on young people’s future employment – with all the economic and social benefits that fulfilling work can bring.