Taking Action with the Adolescent Public Mental Health Model

Globally, many public health programs have been developed and implemented to address mental illness and its prevention, with specific attention to schools. The call for better integration of mental health services into medical care clinics has also been an important development, while investment in school mental health has grown in the past two decades. Addressing the barriers to change requires a clear commitment to create a critical mass of action as efforts are often piecemeal and uncoordinated. To address this, coordinated efforts between community leaders, local or regional departments of public health and mental health, and schools using tools such as the collective impact framework are a promising development with research support. The concepts and strategies of systems change and collective impact offer a viable road map for developing and sustaining adolescent public health programs that are efficient and cost-effective and that will necessarily prepare our future adults with skills and behaviors needed in the mid- to late twenty-first century.