Co-Designing for Youth Mental Health: Participatory, Community-Based, and Digital Approaches to Resilience and Well-Being in the Context of Adversity

Dear Colleagues,

Young people worldwide face compounding adversities—structural racism, community and interpersonal violence, economic precarity, climate instability, and digital harms—that threaten mental health and well-being. Yet, youth consistently demonstrate remarkable resilience through cultural assets, social networks, identity exploration, and creative self-expression. Their lived expertise is indispensable for designing systems of mental health support that are equitable, relevant, and effective.

Traditional top–down approaches and interventions fail to address these intersecting realities. In contrast, participatory design, community-engaged research, and digital mental health innovations (human-centered and user-centered design frameworks) show promise but remain fragmented across disciplines and are rarely integrated into contexts of structural adversity.

This Special Issue, “Co-Designing for Youth Mental Health: Participatory, Community-Based, and Digital Approaches to Resilience and Well-Being in the Context of Adversity,” seeks to bridge these domains. We invite interdisciplinary contributions that center youth voice, challenge deficit narratives, and advance asset-based, trauma-informed, and scalable solutions.

We particularly encourage submissions focused on marginalized and under-engaged adolescents and emerging adults (ages 12–24). Areas of interest may include, but are not limited to, Black, Indigenous, rural, LGBTQ+, im(migrant), and system-involved youth, and we welcome original research, reviews, methodological papers, case studies, youth co-authored works, and community briefs.

Submissions from diverse disciplines, not limited to psychology, public health, nursing, social work, digital health, education, anthropology, and community practice, are encouraged.

Topics of Interest May Include the Following:

• Youth participatory action research (YPAR) and co-design methods;
• Digital and hybrid mental health interventions;
• Community- and school-based mental health programs in high-adversity settings;
• Violence exposure, trauma, and healing-centered engagements;
• Digital ecologies and online risk environments;
• Dating violence among marginalized youth;
• Stress biology, coping, and resilience processes among marginalized youth;
• Arts-based, narrative, and multimodal methods elevating youth voice;
• Youth-endorsed implementation and acceptability in real-world contexts.

By synthesizing these perspectives, this Special Issue aims to shape policy, practice, and research agendas that genuinely reflect and respond to young people’s realities.

We look forward to your contributions.

Dr. Chuka Emezue
Dr. Tipparat Udmuangpia
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Youth is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• youth mental health
• participatory design
• community-based research
• digital mental health tools
• trauma informed
• resilience and well-being
• youth violence
• equity
• youth engagement
• community–academic partnerships in youth health