Youth Mental Health Multimorbidity

Mental health multimorbidity is the experience of having multiple co-occurring mental health conditions such as depression and psychosis.

Mental health multimorbidity in young people can lead to significant impact on their emotional, physical, and social health and can persist into adulthood. While it is increasingly recognized that many youth seeking mental health care have multiple conditions, getting appropriate and timely diagnosis and treatment can be difficult. While treatments for conditions like depression, anxiety, and eating disorders exist, they do not always address multiple concerns. The approach to treating one condition does not necessarily apply to the other conditions.

Despite the prevalence of multimorbidity, young people experiencing multiple mental health challenges are often excluded from participating in research. The lack of research makes it hard to understand their experiences and create effective pathways to care. These barriers can have negative impacts on young people seeking accessible and effective treatment options.

The Cohort Network for Adolescents and Youth with Mental Health Multimorbidity (CALM) is seeking to improve clinical care for youth with more than one mental health condition. CALM’s development will be guided by youth and caregiver experts with lived/living experience with mental health multimorbidity.

CALM will explore how mental health multimorbidity progresses over time, identify risk and protective factors, and develop precision interventions tailored to the reality of mental health multimorbidity, both in the short and long term. Youth enrolled in CALM will become participants in studies testing different treatment approaches, yielding new findings more efficiently.

The goal of the CALM network is to improve mental health care for youth by understanding the impacts of having multiple mental health challenges.