The Youth Mental Health Map is a data-driven assessment tool developed by a team of mental health researchers and clinicians to help better understand the mental health profiles of young people and improve clinicians’ abilities to identify appropriate treatments.

Traditionally, mental health has been divided into categories like depression, anxiety, or psychosis. But in real life, people often experience a mix of symptoms that don’t fit neatly into one label. That’s why researchers have started using a transdiagnostic approach, which looks at patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviours that are common across many different mental health conditions.

In our first study, young people completed a battery of questionnaires that measured mental health problems, including PTSD, sleep, psychosis, disordered eating, emotion regulation, experiential avoidance, intolerance of anxiety, depression and anxiety. Our research team used an unsupervised dimensionality reduction technique that identifies patterns in large datasets and groups related symptoms together to identify a small number of core transdiagnostic dimensions. The dimensions identified using this technique were uncontrollable thinking patterns, re-experiencing difficult events, rigid high standards, and emotional agency. Using a supervised machine learning technique, the team identified a subset of question items that could be used to measure the four transdiagnostic dimensions more efficiently. These are the 34 question items that make up the Youth Mental Health Map.

In our second study, the Youth Mental Health Map demonstrated moderate-to-good test re-test reliability, indicating that scores on each of the symptom dimensions tend to be consistent over time when administered to the same individuals. Scores on the four dimensions correlated with scores on current gold-standard measures of psychological distress, and correlated with scores on a self-reported scale assessing symptom severity, supporting the construct and criterion validity of the questionnaire.

The Youth Mental Health Map was developed and refined in collaboration with young people and clinicians. It was designed to be brief, easy to use, and relevant across a wide range of experiences.