Early intervention mental health supports for children and young people

Summary

Practitioners in early intervention mental health services commonly work with children, their families and communities to promote protective factors that positively influence mental health and to mitigate risk factors. Earty intervention mental health services are known to be important for children because signs and symptoms of mental ill health often present during infancy.

Programs in early intervention mental health settings commonly aim to support individuals and families before more advanced interventions are needed and/or a diagnostic threshold is reached.

However, insights from a scoping review of the mental health literature, as well as practitioner consultation, showed us that practitioners sometimes struggle with differing definitions of early intervention and knowing where their activities fit.

Earty intervention is also not always straightforward in practice. In particular. our review identified barriers to providing early intervention supports in community mental health settings at the following levels:

Understanding these barriers is important for effectively implementing prevention and early intervention and mitigating challenges.

In this poster, we outline changes in the way we have come to think about mental health and introduce a framework for understanding what we mean when we speak about early intervention. Specifically, we note how the Mental Health Intervention Spectrum is a useful framework for understanding early intervention in community-based mental health services. This framework provides scaffolding for understanding the different levels for early intervention supports and contextualises them within the broader mental health system.

The poster also include relevant practice examples, developed in consultation with practitioners, to illustrate how practitioners can address some of the barriers to intervening early with children and families. These aim to build on child and family strengths to reduce the incidence and severity of mental illness or support children who may require a higher level of support.

Reference

MacDonald, J. B., Helprin, H., Tamiakis, L., Muir, S., & Butler, K. (2026). Early intervention mental health supports for children and young people. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Conference, 16-18 March. Gold Coast, Australia. (Poster)