The Canadian government has earmarked more than $13 million to build a solid evidence base on how best to deliver mental health services to youth. The initiative includes $7.35 million to establish the National Platform for Evidence-based Programs and Practices: Youth Mental Health program and another $6 million in grants for research into Evaluation and Implementation Science for Youth Mental Health.

The initiative is timely, according to Michael Cooper, vice president of data and partnerships at Mental Health Research Canada (MHRC) in Mississauga, Ontario. “Young people [in Canada] are struggling more with mental health compared with other populations,” he told Medscape News Canada. “Of course, everyone’s mental health fell off a cliff in the pandemic. We saw recovery in 2023, and then we saw youth mental health start to degrade again further with high inflation rates because economic anxiety was a primary driver, and it has remained low ever since.”

According to MHRC data, from January 2025 to May 2026, 58% of Canadian youth aged 16-24 years reported medium-to-high levels of anxiety and 32% reported medium-to-high levels of depression. These rates are much higher when looking at vulnerable populations. For instance, 68% of 2SLGBTQIA+ youth reported medium-to-high levels of anxiety and 55% reported medium-to-high levels of depression. Young women also report significantly poorer mental health than young men.

During that same period, 20% of youth accessed mental health support and 14% reported that they needed mental health support but did not access it. In Canada, access to services varies by location and setting. Students have better access to support via their campuses, for instance, and urban areas offer better access than rural or remote ones. Barriers to care include the inability to access support that meets the needs of youth, inability to pay for available support, and long waiting times. Once again, these barriers tend to affect the most vulnerable youth disproportionately.

Evaluating Ongoing Initiatives

“This funding opportunity is linked to the federal government’s investment in in youth mental health through the Youth Mental Health Fund,” Patricia Conrod, PhD, scientific director of the CIHR Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction in Montreal, told Medscape News Canada. Launched in November 2024, the Youth Mental Health Fund is a $500 million commitment by the federal government to make strategic investments that create lasting and meaningful improvements in the mental health of youth and their families.

“That fund has allowed for a number of communities to apply to the federal government to put in place new initiatives across the country that will address youth mental health from different perspectives,” said Conrod. These initiatives will seek to improve access to care, quality of care, and outcomes. This new funding opportunity is designed to help ensure that these initiatives, as well as others with different funding sources, are doing what they are designed to do.

The second part of the initiative is the evidence platform. “We’re funding a large team to create evidence standards and consensus on how to grade evidence in relation to youth mental health interventions, and…make that grading and those recommendations accessible to the public,” said Conrod. “The idea is to continue to generate new evidence as new interventions are designed, refined, and adapted for new contexts so they can feed into the evidence platform.”

Ultimately, “the goal is to address some of the evidence gaps for populations that are not typically included in the primary research,” said Conrod. These groups include vulnerable populations in Canada, such as Indigenous or remote communities. “The focus is on interventions that have some strong evidence base to them and that are being implemented in a different way, in a new context, targeting a different population, adapted in some way to better address, for example, some of the delivery challenges for young people in remote communities…. When you make these small tweaks, you can have a big impact on the efficacy of the program.”

Researchers Are Enthusiastic

Jo Henderson, PhD, a senior scientist with the McCain Centre for Child, Youth and Family Mental Health at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, is enthusiastic about the initiative. “Youth are expressing a lot of concern around social media, climate change, and the state of the world, and they’re reaching out like they’ve never done in the past…, [but] services aren’t necessarily keeping pace with the demand,” they said.

“Although there have been tremendous advances, young people face fragmented services, services that don’t meet their needs, and long wait times. Transitions from adolescent services into adult services or across school systems, [especially if] they don’t have good access to primary care” are particularly fraught with barriers. “The complexity of development through adolescence and young adulthood is not taken into consideration in offering their care.” Henderson is also a chief scientific officer with Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario and Integrated Youth Services and the co-executive director of the newly launched pan-Canadian Integrated Youth Services Collaboration Centre.

Each province and territory is adopting an integrated service model. “It’s codesigned with young people and focuses on thinking about their care from a holistic perspective, bringing together different kinds of services that could be helpful to them, situating them in the community, and providing care for 13 years, from the time they’re 12 to the time they’re 25,” said Henderson. “Across the country, there has been an investment in different kinds of infrastructure supports to do the same thing that we do provincially but at a national level.”

Ensuring Productive Investment

The new funding opportunity will facilitate the research needed to ensure that the best evidence-based approaches to an integrated service model are adopted. “How do we ensure that we are delivering the best care to young people?” asked Henderson. “One piece of that is outcomes. Another is being able to capitalize on whatever is happening globally to inform the services that are delivered. The last piece is having a network of experts, including young people in communities across the country, and we’re gathering data consistently.”

Researchers will play a crucial role in addressing the mental health needs of youth, Henderson continued. “What we need in Canada is evidence that respects a need for reconciliation, that recognizes the limitations of existing evidence, that pushes the field forward, and, at the same time, brings solid evidence to the hands of people planning systems in delivering care, so that the services we’re delivering to young people reflect the best available evidence. Clinicians and system administrators don’t have time to figure this out.”

Interested researchers can learn more about applying for an Evaluation and Implementation Science for Youth Mental Health grant here.

Cooper and Conrod reported no relevant financial relationships. Henderson reported involvement in research projects that have been or could be eligible for grants via the Youth Mental Health Fund.