Next Generation Youth Mental Health Researchers Strive for Impact Despite Misaligned Training, Jobs, and Metrics
A commentary written by: Christine Mulligan, Temitayo Sodunke, Nicole Dryburgh, Kirsten Marchand, Nicole D’souza, Megan Davies, Ashley Radomski, Jordan Edwards
Rethinking Research for a Responsive Youth Mental Health Sector
Canada’s mental health system is under increasing strain due to a growing mental health crisis and longstanding gaps in care, particularly for young people, who face some of the highest mental health challenges and significant barriers to access. The system’s historical fragmentation, lack of resources, and inadequate integration between primary, acute, and community mental health care have left youth without the continuous, appropriate support they require.
However, there is growing momentum for change within the youth mental health system. In 2024, the federal government announced a $500 million Youth Mental Health Fund aimed at improving community-based mental health services and addressing mental health inequities. Investments in integrated youth services, early psychosis intervention, mental health data infrastructure, measurement-based care, and learning health systems signal that transformation is possible — but only if research and training systems keep pace.
This shift goes beyond improving service delivery models; it requires rethinking how data and knowledge are generated and applied within mental health systems. A reimagined youth mental health system demands embedded, rapid, and responsive research created in collaboration with health system leaders, clinicians, communities, and policymakers, with a focus on real-world outcomes. Such research calls for skills like interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration, mixed-methods and implementation science, integrated knowledge translation, community-based participatory research, culturally safe engagement, adaptive leadership, and systems thinking.
Yet the academic training pipeline for research scientists has not kept up, leaving emerging researchers without the practical competencies needed to meet the evolving priorities of the youth mental health system. This gap leaves researchers climbing a steep learning curve when they leave their academic programs and enter the “real world,” perpetuating system inefficiencies and creating missed opportunities to build effective partnerships and implement research with impact.
As trainees and early career researchers (ECRs) in the youth mental health sector and members of the NExT Youth Mental Health network, we see this disconnect every day. Research priorities are shifting, yet graduate programs remain anchored in outdated models — leaving many of us without the tools or support to do the kind of responsive, collaborative work youth mental health demands.
Outdated Training Leaves Emerging Researchers Unprepared
The traditional research training pathway — completing a clinical or academic doctoral program and pursuing an academic research career — no longer aligns with the realities of today’s youth mental health system. These programs continue to prioritize conventional outputs like peer-reviewed publications and individual grants, often at the expense of practical, system-level competencies — such as co-designing services with communities, implementing evidence into practice, navigating complex policy environments, or supporting learning health systems. The result is costly: ECRs are trained within disciplinary silos and evaluated using narrow metrics that leave them underprepared for the roles the sector most urgently needs. This gap not only limits career opportunities for ECRs but also slows progress toward improving youth mental health outcomes.
Even programs that emphasize methodological or clinical expertise, such as PhDs in Clinical Psychology, Public Health, or Epidemiology, often overlook the applied skills required to drive change in real-world settings. Structured opportunities to gain experience in community-based research, service co-design, policy translation, or system-level implementation remain limited. Few programs provide clear pathways into non-academic roles, even for those who have transferable strengths in areas like program evaluation, data analysis, or knowledge mobilization. The cost of this outdated training model is clear: emerging researchers struggle to contribute where they are most needed, and the youth mental health system misses out on their potential impact.
Encouragingly, initiatives like the CIHR Health System Impact Program, the Divert Mental Health, and the new Doctor of Public Health program at the University of Toronto are starting to address these gaps. But broader systemic reform is urgently needed to modernize graduate and postdoctoral training across Canada — creating equitable, flexible, and relevant pathways that better prepare ECRs to help meet today’s youth mental health challenges.
Navigating a Job Market Complicated by Real and Perceived Gaps
Not only does the traditional academic training model fail to equip PhD-trained researchers to meet the needs of the youth mental health system, but it also leaves them struggling to navigate the job market. Even as the youth mental health sector becomes more dynamic, with increasing opportunities outside academia, most doctoral programs continue to prepare students for a shrinking number of tenure-track professorial roles. The academic career path, once the default outcome, is now highly competitive, uncertain, and often misaligned with the kind of real-world impact many ECRs hope to have in youth mental health. Few programs offer pathways into non-academic roles, even for those with naturally transferable skills, such as program evaluation or knowledge mobilization.
When PhD-trained researchers compete for non-academic roles in youth mental health — for example, as embedded researchers, project managers, or in leadership positions — they often struggle to stand out due to perceived or real gaps in their résumés. ECRs may simply lack the skills these roles require due to inadequate training, or they may actually have developed the skills but lacked the opportunity to apply them in non-academic contexts. This creates a perceived lack of competency when they are considered for jobs outside the ivory tower.
In particular, while academic training equips ECRs with rigorous research methods, theoretical frameworks, and specialized expertise, it often leaves them without the applied, real-world experience that employers in healthcare, government, and community-based youth mental health organizations value. These roles demand versatility: working across diverse projects, co-designing services with youth, engaging families and caregivers, implementing evidence-based practices, and balancing tasks such as conducting qualitative interviews while analyzing large-scale mental health data. Without direct experience in these areas, ECRs may appear underqualified — even if they possess valuable, but hidden, transferable skills. For example, a researcher may be highly skilled at engaging with interest holders through collaborative research, but without hands-on engagement experience within youth mental health environments, that strength may go unrecognized.
Moreover, non-academic roles require researchers to be adaptable and excel in areas like communication, collaboration, and project management — competencies rarely emphasized in doctoral programs. Contemporary youth mental health researchers must partner with multidisciplinary teams of service providers, decision-makers, and youth advocates, and help facilitate collaboration between these groups. Yet academic training often offers few structured opportunities to build these skills in meaningful ways. ECRs might in fact have strong project management capabilities — honed through coordinating complex research studies — but may lack the domain-specific language to translate this experience for non-academic employers.
Finally, the shift toward learning health systems and rapid knowledge translation in youth mental health has created demand for researchers who can support continuous data collection, analysis, reporting, and implementation in real time. While academic programs focus on generating knowledge, they often underprepare ECRs for these newer systems of applied practice. Similarly, roles in government or policy organizations increasingly require a working knowledge of mental health policy, legislative processes, and public health infrastructure — areas seldom covered in research-focused training. This blend of real gaps in applied skills and perceived gaps in transferable competencies makes it especially challenging for ECRs to break into and thrive in these evolving roles.
Making Meaning in a System of Misaligned Metrics
This disconnect creates a significant tension: while trainees may be eager to develop "soft" skills that align with the needs of the youth mental health system, such as collaboration, relationship-building, and creative knowledge mobilization, these efforts are not rewarded by traditional academic evaluation systems. Instead, trainees are evaluated based on metrics like publications, conference presentations, grant funding, and their training environment, which reinforces a narrow focus on scholarly productivity. While these metrics are important within academia, they do not reflect the evolving needs of the youth mental health system, which requires collaboration, relationship-building, implementation, and community engagement — activities that are time-intensive and often take away from producing academic outputs.
Moreover, the competitiveness inherent to academic research further exacerbates this issue. As ECRs compete for the same limited positions and funding, the focus on individual productivity often creates barriers to collaboration and community-building. Researchers may feel pressured to "get ahead" rather than work together, creating silos that prevent the development of the cross-disciplinary, collaborative networks needed to drive change in the youth mental health system. This environment of competition undermines the cooperative, relationship-driven work that is crucial for system transformation.
As these challenges continue, it becomes even clearer that we need a more holistic way of measuring what counts as “success” in research. Efforts like DORA (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), which calls for broader measures of research impact like policy influence and community engagement, and new narrative Tri-Agency CV model are steps in the right direction. But their adoption has been slow, and traditional academic measures like publication counts and citation numbers, still dominate. This creates a critical gap where meaningful outcomes, like shorter wait times, better access to care for marginalized youth, and real improvements in well-being and recovery, are overshadowed by metrics that don’t always reflect real-world impact.
This tension is felt most strongly by ECRs who are committed to youth-centered approaches like participatory action research, community co-design, arts-based inquiry, digital storytelling, and intergenerational knowledge circles. These ways of working are deeply ethical and closely aligned with what young people say they want and need, but they take time to build trust and relationships, and their outcomes rarely fit neatly into traditional academic measures. ECRs are often caught in a difficult spot — having to choose between doing meaningful, community-engaged work that makes a difference, or focusing on faster publication to advance their careers. The result is a system that discourages exactly the kind of innovative, boundary-spanning research that could help solve the complex challenges in youth mental health. ECRs face the added challenge of translating these important but undervalued engagement skills into qualifications that are recognized outside academia, in policy, healthcare, or community roles that also expect clear, measurable impact.
In writing this commentary, we found ourselves grappling with the very tension we’re describing. We debated whether to publish in a traditional academic journal, to reach other scientists and thought-leaders in the field — or to share our ideas through other channels that better match our values around decolonizing research and democratizing knowledge. We worried that using a formal academic voice might make it harder for the youth and families who inspired our thinking to see themselves in our work.
Even the process of writing together highlighted these challenges. Our flexible, co-designed approach didn’t fit easily into traditional authorship contribution categories, and we struggled with questions like how to reflect rotating leadership or capture contributions that were shared and hard to separate. The usual authorship order felt too rigid for the way we worked. These conversations showed us how deeply academic conventions are built into the system and into ourselves — even for those of us trying to change them.
In the end, we chose to publish this article in this format because we believe change needs to happen both inside and outside the system. We want to reach decision-makers who can reform how researchers are evaluated, while also working alongside youth partners to model new ways of sharing knowledge. This commentary isn’t just about describing these tensions — it reflects the compromises ECRs make every day as we try to drive change from within while pushing for foundational transformations in how research is valued and used in youth mental health.
Young People’s Mental Health Can’t Wait — Neither Will We
We’re frustrated. The youth mental health system is evolving, but academic training and evaluation models are stuck in the past. The current system continues to prioritize individual productivity over collaboration and real-world impact, leaving ECRs underprepared to meet the urgent priorities of the sector and position themselves as candidates for careers in the field. We need training programs that align with the system’s demands — programs that foster interdisciplinary collaboration, leadership, and co-design, and evaluation metrics that reward competencies that drive meaningful change.
But we’re not waiting around for the system to change. We’re taking matters into our own hands. By creating peer-led networks like NExT Youth Mental Health — a grassroots initiative that has brought together over 50 ECRs and trainees from across Canada — we’re building the skills, experience, and multidisciplinary community we need. By focusing on collective impact rather than individual success, we’re building the collaborative, systems-level expertise that the youth mental health system desperately needs.
It’s time for the academic system to catch up. In the meantime, we’re forging ahead, making real change from the ground up — and we invite our peers, mentors, and institutions to join us in building a youth mental health research ecosystem that truly meets the moment.
Use of AI Statement: This writing is original in content and ideas, with an AI large-language model used only for grammar corrections and clarification. The authors are aware it may flag AI indicators and openly declare how AI was used in this work.