Child and Adolescent Mental Health Care in Practice: Interventions, Service Organisation, and Implementation Across Contexts

Globally, 1 in 7 adolescents aged 10–19 experiences a mental disorder - yet major gaps remain in how mental health care is organised, implemented, and accessed, underscoring the need to strengthen services research and real-world delivery.While evidence on risk factors, prevalence, and individual treatments is growing, less is known about how mental health care is organised, implemented, and experienced across different systems and contexts. There is a particular need to understand how services can be made more accessible, equitable, and responsive to the diverse realities of children, adolescents, and their families.The aim of this Research Topic is to advance knowledge on how child and adolescent mental health care is designed, delivered, and improved in real-world settings, including implementation science evidence on what helps interventions and models of care be adopted, adapted, and sustained; and which interventions are effective in promoting, protecting, and restoring mental health. The goal is to generate actionable evidence to strengthen everyday practice, improve models of care and service organisation, and inform context-sensitive policies and implementation strategies. By bringing together research on care delivery, implementation, and outcomes, this collection seeks to support the development of more inclusive, effective, and resilient mental health care systems for children and adolescents.This collection will prioritise studies that examine interventions, models of care, and everyday care practices in child and adolescent mental health across diverse settings, including clinical services, community-based programmes, family-focused initiatives, social services, digital environments, civil society organisations, and educational settings when they function as spaces of care or psychosocial support.We welcome empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions that:• Evaluate or describe mental health interventions and therapeutic approaches for children and adolescents, including clinical therapies, school and community-based interventions (e.g., targeting bullying, substance abuse, suicidal behaviour and non-suicidal self-injury in adolescence), early intervention models, crisis response strategies, as well as digital and telehealth programmes, and caregiver- or family-focused approaches.• Analyse models of care and service organisation, including coordination across sectors (health, social services, justice, child protection, education, community organisations), care pathways, stepped-care models, and mechanisms that ensure continuity, accessibility, equity, and cultural relevance of services.• Implementation science studies examining determinants, strategies, and mechanisms of implementation (e.g., adoption, reach, feasibility, fidelity, adaptation, equity, cost, sustainability), including hybrid effectiveness–implementation designs and evaluations of scale-up.• Examine how social determinants and structural inequalities shape access to care, engagement with services, and mental health outcomes, particularly among vulnerable, minoritised/ underserved groups.• Investigate participatory and co-design approaches that involve children, adolescents, families, practitioners, and communities in designing, implementing, or evaluating mental health interventions and services.• Explore policies or organisational strategies when they directly influence care delivery, implementation processes, or the effectiveness and sustainability of mental health interventions and services.To be suitable for this Research Topic, submissions should clearly address implications for care delivery, service organisation, implementation and scale-up, and/or policy. Manuscripts focused primarily on prevalence or risk factors are welcome, provided the implementation implications and impact on practice are made explicit (rather than remaining purely descriptive).Priority will be given to studies that report:• Mental health outcomes• Service or process outcomes (e.g., access, equity, continuity), and/or • Implementation outcomes (e.g., acceptability, feasibility, fidelity, sustainability) Contributions using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods designs are all welcome, provided they offer clear implications for practice, service organisation, or policy.If you were not directly invited by the Topic Editors but wish to submit, you are welcome to do so; however, please contact us at childandadolescentpsychiatry@frontiersin.org before submitting and wait for our confirmation that your manuscript is within scope. Topic editors: Paula Diogo, Aline Silva, Marina Nolli Bittencourt, BRUNA FREITAS Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/77829/child-and-adolescent-mental-health-care-in-practice-interventions-service-organisation-and-implementation-across-contexts