About us

Global Child and Adolescent Mental Health Study (GCAMHS) is a research initiative, which aims to

• Stimulate and sustain national and international research on child and adolescent mental health and psychosocial wellbeing.
• Collect comparable data from member countries and promote advances in theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches to research on child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing.
• Disseminate research findings to various relevant parties, including scholars, policymakers in the health and education sectors, health promotion practitioners, educators, parents, and children & adolescents.
• Develop and strengthen an international network of experts in this field.

Roots of GCAMHS

GCAMHS builds on a network of prominent researchers and clinicians in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology across 32 countries and four continents.

The network dates back to the bilateral collaboration of Professor André Sourander, University of Turku, Finland and Professor Hitoshi Kaneko, Nagoya University, Japan in 2011. They conducted the same survey among adolescents in Finnish and Japanese schools.

Between 2011 and 2017 China, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Lithuania, Norway, Russia, Singapore and Vietnam joined the collaboration and conducted the survey in the respective countries.

First Wave Data Collection

Eurasian Child and Adolescent Mental Health Study (EACMHS) group was established in 2016, when the European and Asian research group met in a conference in Turku. The mission of the network was set to respond to the need for collaborative research addressing timely and pressing questions in adolescent mental health in a cross-cultural, multi-site research setting.

Great majority of studies in the field of child and adolescent mental health come from Western, high income countries and international research initiatives, covering low- and middle-income countries are scarce.

Second Wave Data Collection

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic evoked an idea to collect the same data again to assess changes in adolescents’ mental health from pre- to post-pandemic world. The second survey will be conducted in the same schools, using the same methodology, protocol and measurement tool.

Together the data collected in two time-points will form time-trend data, which enables examination of changes in adolescents’ mental health over time. The kick-off meeting for the new wave of data collection was arranged online in autumn 2021.

Global network

The network has gradually expanded since 2022, as new countries have joined for the post-pandemic wave data collection. It now covers 32 countries, all committed to conducting the same school survey between 2022-2024.