National Research Programme "Mental Health of Adolescents" (NRP 85)

Rates of adolescent mental health problems in Switzerland have increased over the past decade. Both well-established risk factors (e.g. sociodemographic disadvantage, parental mental health problems, harsh family or peer dynamics, poor self-regulation and social skills), and newer ones (e.g. problematic digital media use and adverse online experiences, rising academic pressure, physical inactivity and adolescents’ concerns about climate change, recent wars, future employability in the context of artificial intelligence and broader uncertainty about the future) contribute to this trend.

Mental health problems, including internalising and externalising problems, often emerge by adolescence and pose a risk to long-term mental health. What is more, mental health inequities often accumulate across development and may persist into adulthood if not addressed. Thus, adolescence is an important developmental period for prevention and early intervention.

This is why NRP 85 aims to produce actionable, scalable knowledge on how to prevent or intervene before adolescent mental health declines to the level of diagnosable disorders. Specifically, the NRP will fund research that improves the evidence base on prevention and early intervention approaches, that advances the understanding of systemic risk and protective factors for adolescent mental health, and that supports the development of policy-relevant and practice-oriented solutions.

NRP 85 consists of two research areas:

Research area 1 "Prevention and early intervention approaches" will examine how evidence-based interventions can be adapted, developed and evaluated in Swiss contexts, with a particular focus on innovative, low-threshold and scalable approaches that extend beyond the traditional healthcare system and meet the needs of diverse and vulnerable adolescent populations.

Research area 2 "Systemic risk and protective factors" will investigate how structural conditions in formally organised environments – such as education, vocational training and mandatory military and civil service – influence adolescent mental health, with the goal of identifying systemic characteristics that support or hinder positive developmental trajectories.

All projects are encouraged to engage with non-academic partners and should produce outputs that can inform policy development, system design and the implementation of prevention and early intervention strategies. Projects in research area 1 are required to have a non-academic project partner and to include transdisciplinary elements in their project design.

NRP 85 will operate with overall funding of 7 million Swiss francs. The research phase will last 4 years.