Adolescent Well-being in Flux: A Comparative Analysis of Adolescent Health Behaviors and Mental Distress Across Countries and Time

Dr. Clarissa Janousch (University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, Experimental Pharmacopsychology and Psychological Addiction Research),
Dr. Laura Bechtiger  (Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, Risk and Resilience)

The rising youth mental health crisis, characterized by higher levels of internalizing symptoms in more recent cohorts of adolescents, especially adolescent girls, has inspired novel research into understanding its potential drivers and causes. The examined factors have been manifold, ranging from the rise of social media to sexual violence exposure to macroeconomic factors, and these studies typically identified mixed findings for many indicators. Important determinants of mental distress that have received less attention in this context of explaining secular changes are health-risk behaviors. Yet, health-risk behaviors, such as physical inactivity, unhealthy diets, substance use (e.g., alcohol, smoking, cannabis use), and risky sexual behavior are important determinants of individual mental distress and are known to differ between males and females. Since some evidence suggests secular trends also exist in health-risk behaviors, secular changes in health behavior profiles over the past two decades need to be systematically examined in relation to changes in mental distress. Thus, the main aim of this project, which holds significant implications for understanding and addressing the youth mental health crisis, is to bridge diverse and interdisciplinary research fields on health-risk behaviors, mental health, and their social determinants to describe patterns and determinants of health-risk behaviors and mental distress across different countries and time. To this end, we will leverage data from the publicly available Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, an internationally standardized, repeated cross-sectional survey of adolescents from the general population in over 40 countries across Europe and North America. Understanding these patterns and determinants could inform the development of targeted public health interventions aimed at reducing health-risk behaviors and mitigating their impact on adolescent mental health, ultimately helping to address the broader youth mental health crisis.