New initiative to help young people with poor mental health when ‘red flags’ appear

SINGAPORE – Young people with poor mental health will get more help through a programme that trains school counsellors and social workers to spot red flags and tackle distress before it escalates.

The Youth Connect Psychological Interventions framework, launched on June 20, aims to address a mental health crisis among Singapore’s adolescents, which had brewed silently until the Covid-19 pandemic, said programme head Dr Angelina Ang, a senior consultant in the emergency department of KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH).

It comes after the hospital studied patients aged 10 to 19 who had been admitted to its emergency department in 2021 for trying to harm or kill themselves.

The study, published in February, found that about one in five of these adolescents had visited a hospital or polyclinic for medically unexplained physical symptoms like headaches and stomach aches within the year prior to attempting self-harm or suicide.

Said Dr Ang: “Medically unexplained symptoms are red flags – symptoms of distress, anxiety, or maybe even abuse, and if we continue to sweep them under the carpet, they will crash on the child.”

Difficulties sleeping, dealing with family conflict and anxieties related to academic performance were the top challenges faced by these adolescents.

More than half the patients who attempted self-harm or suicide said they were confused or unsure about whether they truly wanted to end their lives, which suggests that their decisions can be driven by impulse and inability to process their emotions.

The price paid for ignoring such signs is huge, said Dr Ang, citing a 2023 report by Duke-NUS Medical School and the Institute of Mental Health estimating that the annual cost to treat a child for depression and anxiety here averaged $10,250.

To plug these gaps, the programme developed by psychologists from KKH and James Cook University (JCU) teaches community groups how to intervene when young people display these physical symptoms and have difficulty managing emotions.

Since October 2024, more than 300 school counsellors and community mental health practitioners have been trained, KKH and Temasek Foundation said in a joint statement.

Parked under the Temasek Foundation Youth Connect programme, the initiative is complemented by screening at KKH’s emergency department that coordinates care for these young people with schools and communities.

KKH chief executive Alex Sia said since such screening was implemented in October 2022, it has assessed more than 2,500 young people, and provided support to over 1,300 of them.

In addition, Dr Ang said KKH and JCU is also jointly working to develop a programme to tackle sleep habits of the young, which is an easier topic to broach than mental health. The programme remains in the works, but the team has started training community groups and professionals to deliver these interventions.

Minister of State for Health Rahayu Mahzam said at the launch event at KKH that the Youth Connect Programme allows for a seamless care system that can minimise the risk of young people falling through the cracks.

She added: “Today’s launch is more than just a new programme for mental health support. It represents our collective commitment – regardless of our area of work – to support young people who we meet, in ways that best suit them.”

The programme joins a nationwide push for more to be done to address the mental health crisis plaguing Singapore’s teens, with one in three young people reporting severe symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress,

according to a recent nationwide survey

.

Mental disorders are the

leading cause of disability and death

among those aged 10 to 14 in Singapore, according to a study published in The Lancet Public Health medical journal in May.

The impact of mental distress on Singapore’s population was also ranked the highest among Asean countries in the study. Despite many of Singapore’s adolescents reporting signs of mental distress, a nationwide study of youth mental health by NUS flagged a gap in parents’ understanding of the issues that their children faced.

The study released in 2023 found that

only about one in 10 parents

observed signs of distress in their children, despite one in three reporting symptoms like depression and anxiety.