Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former

health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical

health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health

question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, the podcast turns to the

mental health of children and adolescents. Dr. Josh Sharfstein speaks with Johns Hopkins

Professor Tamar Mendelssohn, a psychologist and researcher who is closely watching the growing mental health crisis in the United States. Let's listen.

Dr. Tamar Mendelsohn, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call to talk about what many have called a crisis in mental health for America's young people.

Can you talk about why there is such a recognition of this state of crisis?

Thank you, Josh, for having me on.

And absolutely, this is a time of serious crisis in terms of youth mental health.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,

and the Children's Hospital Association, in fact, declared a national emergency in child and

adolescent mental health during the pandemic,

and the U.S. Surgeon General also issued an advisory on the youth mental health crisis.

So what we know is that young people's mental health was already a concern before the pandemic,

but it's now, I think, really become something that the public is more aware

of because the pandemic really intensified and increased these problems. What we saw is that

rates of childhood mental health concerns, including suicidal behavior, were already

increasing between 2010 and 2020. In 2019, for example,

...