headspace data reveals urgent need in youth mental health

A research team led by Professor Ian Hickie and Dr Frank Iorfino from the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre have called for an urgent reconfigure of our national youth service networks to address the unmet clinical and psychosocial needs of youth presenting in the early stages of major mental disorders. This comes as their review of clinical data from headspace — the national service for young people experiencing psychological distress — found only around one-third of clients improving after receiving care and two-thirds either remaining the same or deteriorating.

With mental health conditions among young people between the ages of 12 and 25 increasing by 50% over the past 20 years — and the COVID-19 pandemic being a contributing factor in the worsening of young people’s mental states — urgent action, the researchers argue, is needed to improve the models of care provided by headspace and allow clinicians to provide more effective and personalised care.

“Nationally, headspace provides an extremely valuable service for young people in psychological distress. But it is a victim of its own success with both demand and the complexity of cases increasing dramatically,” Hickie said. “This isn’t necessarily about increasing funding but changing the structure of headspace clinics on a national level, so that clients are assessed by senior clinicians at an earlier stage and, where appropriate, put on the right pathways to support their needs.”

Increasing the use of online assessments to determine the severity of a client’s psychological distress and having a consistent approach to psychological assessments to ensure a national standard are other recommendations from the researchers. While in the case of people with complex psychological needs — where an individual has additional issues such as substance abuse or multiple mental health disorders — the researchers highlight the importance of having clear pathways to a range of medical and psychological services, such as alcohol, drug or housing services.

“If we can reconfigure existing models of care to make them more effective, we can make a huge impact on the quality of care that young people receive and also improve their health outcomes,” Iorfino said.

The researchers also found discrepancies in the way that headspace National records the severity of its clients’ needs. A study carried out in 2023, for example, stated that almost half of clients using the headspace national service had no significant symptoms or risk factors, with less than 30% having a clinical disorder, such as anxiety or depression. Yet a separate, 2024 headspace services study suggested that 50% of clients were rated as having very high levels of psychological distress and 46% had significantly impaired function.

“We suspect that the inconsistencies could be a result of differences in the outcome measures used to evaluate the success of treatment, or differences in the times between a period of treatment concluding and a follow-up session taking place,” Iorfino said. Though the researchers also said that the reasons for these inconsistencies in data reporting are not yet fully understood and further research is planned to address this issue in more detail.

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‘Novel youth mental health services in Australia: What differences are being reported about the clinical needs of those who attend and the outcomes achieved?’, a 2025 paper about this review of headspace clinical data, has been published open access in Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry and you can read it at doi.org/10.1177/00048674241297542.

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If you are affected by any of the issues discussed in this article, help is available. Lifeline has a 24/7 crisis support service, please call 13 11 14.

Image credit: iStock.com/Drazen Zigic