Estimating Self-Report Adolescent Mental Health: Current Challenges and Opportunities

Adolescence is a period of change and increased mental health difficulties, which are important for life-time outcomes. Adolescent mental health is therefore an active research area, with large samples often drawing on self-report general measures (i.e., not disorder specific, or focused on a narrow outcome). In this personal view we make the case that these general self-report outcomes likely have a key role to play in improving our understanding of issues such as prevalence, antecedents, prevention and intervention. However, perhaps surprisingly, high-quality measures in this area are lacking. We offer insights into historical and psychometric challenges that have contributed to this landscape, as well as highlighting the implications of relying on poor measures. We make recommendations for research and practice on how to select measures and improve the evidence base, and make a call to action to stop accepting the status quo of low quality measures in this field.