Estimating Adolescent Mental Health in the General Population: Current Challenges and Opportunities

Adolescence is a period of change and increased mental health difficulties, which are important for life-time outcomes. Adolescent mental health is therefore an active research area, with large samples often drawing on self-report general measures (i.e., not disorder-specific, or focused on a narrow outcome). We argue these measures likely have a key role to play in improving our understanding of issues such as prevalence, antecedents, prevention and intervention. However, perhaps surprisingly, high-quality measures in this area are lacking. We offer insights into historical and psychometric challenges that have contributed to this landscape, as well as highlighting the implications of relying on poor measures, which at their worst can be biased and unethical. We make recommendations for research and practice on selecting measures and improving the evidence base, and make a call to action to stop accepting the status quo of low quality measures in this field.