Youth Mental Health
Our research is focused on improving access to quality mental health services for young Australians and understanding how to reduce tech-based harms.
The Challenge
Despite Australia increasing its investment into mental health services since 2006, and service use amongst young people aged 15-24 increasing substantially, the mental health of young people in Australia has also been steadily declining.
To address these challenges, there is a need for greater and smarter investment into the mental health system, including youth mental health services, to improve the system’s ability to cope with its volume. Smarter investment will require understanding key system leverage points where intervention can have the greatest impact.
The Approach
As part of System 2’s commitment to transform the lives of millions of people by designing, testing and scaling solutions to society’s biggest challenges, we have conducted a range of recent research activities.
Our research aims to:
1. Understand the informal supports and professional services available to young people experiencing mental health challenges.
2. Identify the psychological and structural barriers that make it hard to ask for or get help from these services.
3. Identify and develop actionable ideas for how the system could work more effectively, to improve access to quality mental health services for young people through a behavioural and systems lens.
Recent work
Tracking the out-of-pocket costs for young people
System 2 has been analysing five years of Medicare data (2020-21 to 2024-25) to track young people’s out-of-pocket mental health costs. Our latest analysis found that young people aged 15-24 paid, on average, double the out-of-pocket cost for a Medicare-subsidised mental health service in 2024-25 compared to 2020-21. Our aim is to highlight the role that cost plays in young people’s access to mental health care. You can read our latest report (July 2026) here.
Mapping the mental health system
Explore our webinar below (recorded on April 3, 2025) to dive deeper into our exploratory research mapping the youth mental health system, including our proposal for regulating ‘dark patterns’ in social media design that contribute to youth mental ill health. Click to view the system map and our comprehensive report: ‘A fresh approach to improving access to quality mental health services for young Australians‘.