The Youth Development Instrument: engaging stakeholders and linking data to monitor and promote youth mental health and well-being trajectories beyond the pandemic

Mental disorders have a peak onset in adolescence and young adulthood, with 1 in 5 Canadians under the age of 25 affected per year. Along with social and economic stressors such as discrimination and income inequality, youth face unique impacts caused by the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Social and emotional learning and positive childhood experiences can avert or delay mental illness onset and/or severity, yet 95% of health system funding is allocated to specialized, hospital-based or downstream services. Through intersectoral collaborations, we developed the Youth Development Instrument (YDI) to measure youth mental health (MH) and well-being and to investigate how childhood experiences influence MH and well-being trajectories in emerging adulthood. Developed to measure MH and well-being of Grade 11 students, the YDI was first piloted in Spring 2021. Wave 1 collected ~2,300 responses in 6 school districts in British Columbia (BC). By the end of Wave 2 (Spring 2022), we anticipate collecting 10,000 responses from 22 BC districts. Our project aims to: 1) Monitor pandemic-era youth MH and well-being using the YDI; 2) Identify early life risk and protective factors of internalizing and externalizing MH outcomes and life satisfaction in youth in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; and 3) Inform the development of a collaborative data-to-action strategy to support school, community, and health system stakeholders in improving youth MH and well-being during COVID-19 recovery using Aim 1 and 2 findings. Mental disorders pose a critical threat to young people's current and future health. Early intervention may prevent a substantial portion of this burden but requires an understanding of the complex web of its determinants. We will link the YDI to other data sources to create a comprehensive map of the links between child and youth development and MH in emerging adulthood, in turn informing data-to-action initiatives.