Across the globe, education systems are increasingly being asked to do more than deliver academic outcomes. As rates of anxiety, depression, trauma, and emotional distress rise among adolescents, schools are becoming the first, and sometimes only place where young people’s mental health needs are visible. Yet most teachers, despite daily contact with students, are not trained to recognize early warning signs or to respond confidently and appropriately when a student is in distress. Training...

Schools sit at the center of adolescent life. For most young people, school is the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours, form friendships, develop identities, and encounter adult authority outside the home. This makes schools not just sites of academic instruction, but primary social and developmental environments. In the context of a global youth mental health crisis, this positioning presents an extraordinary and often underutilized opportunity. At a time when mental...

Adolescence, broadly defined as the period between the ages of ten and nineteen, is one of the most formative stages of the human lifespan. During these years, young people undergo rapid physical growth, profound neurological changes, emotional development, and social reorientation. It is a time when individuals shape identities, values, relationships, and aspirations that will carry forward into adulthood. Yet it is also during this same developmental window that the majority of mental...