Sponsors (17)
Creates an NIH Youth Mental Health Research Initiative and authorizes $100M per year for FY2025–2030 to coordinate and expand youth mental health research.
The bill invests federal funds to expand youth mental health research and the potential for better prevention, school-based supports, and clinical care, but delivers a modest taxpayer cost and risks uneven implementation and reduced institutional flexibility if translation and governance are not carefully managed.
Children and adolescents (and their families) nationwide stand to gain more effective, research-backed prevention and treatment options because NIH will fund a Youth Mental Health Research Initiative at $100M per year from FY2025–2030.
Schools and community providers could receive better tools and delivery models to identify and support youth at risk through targeted research on interventions in the settings where youth live and learn.
Health systems, clinicians, and patients with youth mental health needs may benefit from wider adoption of evidence-based practices informed by coordinated NIH research, improving quality of care over time.
If funding and leadership are concentrated at NIH without clear plans for translating findings, communities (including schools and youth) may experience delayed, uneven, or limited implementation of effective interventions.
Taxpayers will face increased federal spending totaling about $600 million over FY2025–2030 to finance the initiative, which is a modest budgetary cost that could compete with other priorities.
Directing program leadership to specific NIH institutes may reduce flexibility or marginalize other centers with relevant expertise, potentially limiting how well the research portfolio addresses diverse needs.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Creates a new NIH Youth Mental Health Research Initiative led by NIMH in coordination with NICHD and NIMHD to coordinate and expand research on youth mental health resilience, identification, and delivery of interventions. Authorizes $100 million per year for fiscal years 2025–2030 to support the initiative’s work. The initiative will focus on (1) social, behavioral, cognitive, and developmental studies to build resilience and community capacity to identify and care for youth at risk or in crisis, and (2) research to improve targeting and delivery of mental health interventions in clinical and community settings where youth live, play, work, and learn.
Official title: To establish a Youth Mental Health Research Initiative in the National Institutes of Health for purposes of encouraging collaborative research to improve youth mental health.
Introduced April 1, 2025 by Bonnie Watson Coleman · Last progress April 1, 2025