AI in Youth Mental Health: From Evidence to Practice
A special issue of Children (ISSN 2227-9067). This special issue belongs to the section "Pediatric Mental Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 5 November 2026 | Viewed by 20
Special Issue Editor
Interests: pediatric clinical psychology; neuropsychology; cognitive neuroscience; psychopathology; neuroeducation; psychotherapeutic processes; applied psychology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Mental-health problems among children, adolescents, and young adults have reached unprecedented levels, while specialist services remain unable to meet demand. Artificial-intelligence (AI) tools—chatbots, mobile-health apps, virtual reality, AI-augmented internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy, and machine-learning decision-support systems—are being deployed rapidly as scalable complements to traditional care, yet the evidence base remains fragmented across single modalities, single conditions, or single age bands. This Special Issue assembles cross-modality, cross-condition contributions that move the field beyond whether AI mental-health interventions work on average toward the more clinically-useful questions of for whom, which AI modality, at what dose, and under what safeguards they work best. We welcome rigorously-conducted systematic reviews, meta-analyses, prospective trials, individual-participant-data analyses, and implementation-science studies aligned with PRISMA 2020, CONSORT-AI, TRIPOD+AI, and GRADE. Methodological-innovation papers (extraction-integrity auditing, AI-specific risk-of-bias domains, fairness audits) and ethics-, equity-, and lived-experience–focused contributions are particularly encouraged. Together, the collection will deliver a citable evidence base to inform clinical practice, policy, and the next generation of paediatric digital-mental-health research.
Dr. Evgenia Gkintoni
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- artificial intelligence
- digital mental health
- children
- adolescents
- young adults
- chatbots
- mobile health
- virtual reality
- machine learning
- internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy
- depression
- anxiety
- suicide and self-harm
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