Increasing provision of low-threshold and specialised treatment should be supported by increasing the capacity of the mental health workforce and by creating new roles. Policy makers should plan and, when necessary, increase the capacity of mental health professionals, including psychologists, mental health nurses, general practitioners, psychiatrists, social workers and occupational therapists. Where necessary, policy makers can also increase workforce capacity by creating new roles for existing professions, such as midwife‑led PPD diagnosis in Next Stop: Mum, or new professions, such as orthopaedagogues in the Belgian reform. At the same time, they should ensure integrating these new roles with established, traditional roles across healthcare and other sectors, such as the social sector.
Providing free access to psychological treatment will incur cost for the governments. Reducing cost barrier is essential to increasing accessibility of psychological therapy. Both PMHC and the Belgian reform removed the cost barrier, either partly or in full. PMHC is totally free of charge for patients, and the Belgian reform entitles patients up to 20 free psychological consultations per year. In practice, this reform enabled mental health support and treatment to be provided to more than 140 000 patients per year at a cost of EUR 1 122 per patient. Implementing interventions that facilitate access will inevitably increase government costs, but extensive work has pointed to the high direct and indirect costs of untreated mental ill-health (OECD, 2021[7]; 2021[21]) and the forthcoming OECD publication on the economics of mental ill-health will report on the return on investment of the commonly used mental health interventions, taking into account a broader societal perspective.
Finally, implementing best practice interventions will require paying attention to the emergence of new drivers of declining child and adolescent mental health. The OECD Recommendation on Children in the Digital Environment highlights both the risks and opportunities of digitalisation, offering governments and stakeholders a framework for policies that protect and empower children online (OECD, 2022[29]). A deeper understanding of the association between digital device use, social media, and poor mental health is urgently needed. The OECD’s “How’s Life for Children in the Digital Age” (OECD, forthcoming[30]) will address some of these questions, and goes some way to responding to OECD Health Ministers call for the OECD to develop a co‑ordinated initiative to mitigate the risks of digitalisation and social media platforms on the mental health of children and young people. Additionally, there is an urgent need to capture critical expert data (from parents, teachers, health professionals), hear from young people themselves, and to understand the impact of new policies or interventions, such as school phone bans. To this end, the OECD will be starting a major new project to better support policy makers in their efforts to understand and safeguard young people’s mental health.