Today is International Youth Day, a day to celebrate young people, amplify their voices and recognise the importance of investing in their health and wellbeing!

To mark the day, the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) highlighted Youth-GEMs and our work to better understand and support young people’s mental health. 

For us, this recognition also speaks to something bigger: the importance of sustained public investment in youth mental health research.

Understanding mental health across adolescence and early adulthood is complex. It requires long-term research, collaboration across countries and disciplines and, crucially, the meaningful involvement of young people themselves. Public funding through programmes such as Horizon Europe makes research at this scale possible.

In Youth-GEMs, young people are not simply the focus of our research; they help shape it. With their involvement, the project has developed two complementary digital tools designed to support mental wellbeing:

• Youth-GEMs Monitoring works passively in the background, collecting sensor data related to mobility, physical activity, sleep and phone use. The aim is to support research into changes that could provide early indications of distress and opportunities for earlier preventive support.
• Gemmy takes a more active approach, offering daily activities such as goal setting and emotion labelling, alongside accessible grounding activities and educational resources when support is needed.

On International Youth Day, we thank our Young Experts, consortium partners and public funders for making this work possible and HaDEA for highlighting Youth-GEMs and the importance of investing in youth mental health research.

See the full post on LinkedIn.