Gracie Wilson and Momoko Katayama reflect on the key points raised at the Cultures of Youth Mental Health workshop held at the University of Chicago’s Hong Kong campus.
The Cultures of Youth Mental Health workshop took place between from January the 23rd to the 25th (2025) at The University of Chicago, Francis and Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong. Chaired by Eugene Raikhel (University of Chicago) and Junko Kitanaka (Keio University), the two and a half day workshop was attended by eighteen scholars, students, and clinicians from across North America, the UK, and East Asia. The discussions had at the workshop revealed a central paradox: while growing mental health awareness has reduced stigma and increased help-seeking, it has simultaneously risked medicalising everyday distress, obscuring structural issues, and instrumentalising care.
This piece synthesises the workshop’s key insights, exploring how youth mental health is understood across different institutional and cultural contexts, what it means for a young person to be healthy, and how young people themselves conceptualise a ‘good life.’
What kind of problem is youth mental health?
The workshop challenged simple narratives of a youth mental health ‘crisis.’ Eugene Raikhel, for example, contextualised rising reports of mental health issues amongst North American college students through interviews with college counsellors, revealing that ‘crisis’ represents a diverse collection of social, expert, and institutional shifts: decreased stigma, increased reporting and help-seeking, practitioner emphasis on mental health, expanded use of psychotropic medications, disability and accommodation legislation, social and political turmoil, and broader change in the language of psychiatric distress. Rather than solely indicating pathology, these trends are linked to fundamental transformations in how young people understand and express distress.
Raikhel illuminated a paradox in the under and over utilisation of mental health resources, where a proportion of students are embracing psychiatric language and seeking mental health support for potentially less severe concerns, while marginalised students and those with severe conditions do not or cannot access sufficient services. This pattern emerged across multiple contexts. Sherry Kit Wa Chan (University of Hong Kong) recounted the forms of self-care, community building, and peer networks that Hong Kong students employ to cope with many of the same anxieties as their peers in other countries. While rates of formal service can animate many discussions of help-seeking, students develop and make use of a diverse array of informal support.
The shifting role of the clinic
Several scholars examined how young people’s engagement with psychiatric language and treatment blurs the boundaries between clinical treatment and everyday life. Meeta Kumar (University of Chicago) and Philip Rosenbaum (Haverford College) both described how efforts to ‘normalise mental health’ has lowered stigma but transformed the counselling centre into a container for any, and all, experiences of discomfort. Students increasingly use therapy as a tool of ongoing emotional maintenance rather than crisis management – seeking professional support for issues that in the past they might have discussed with roommates or friends. Kumar attributed this shift partly to a rise in wellness services worldwide, noting that while young people face novel challenges, they also have access to a vast assortment of self-help, technological, and on-demand services that sometimes articulate experiences in terms of mental pathology.
The strategic use of diagnosis has emerged as a global phenomenon, with students across geographical contexts utilising mental health categories and concepts to articulate their needs and secure accommodations. While these efforts demonstrate the competencies acquired by a generation highly conscious of mental health issues, they have also been criticised as signs of over-medicalisation. Kumar challenged attendees to consider what meaningful options exist for young people to describe their experiences beyond psychiatric language.
Junko Kitanaka (Keio University) and clinical psychologist Hayuru Hino (Keio University) explored how Japan’s 2016 ‘reasonable accommodations’ mandate across national universities presupposes autonomous individuals who can identify their own needs and actively seek support. This legal model has greatly helped students with physical disabilities, but proves challenging for students with mental health issues, whose symptoms fluctuate and are not always readily identifiable in clear linguistic or categorical terms. Drawing on this theme, Yuto Kano (Keio University) explored how clinicians mark value through resource and support allocation for students with autism. Kano highlighted the ways in which clinicians at the university negotiate the balance between enhancing individual lives and making environmental changes, whilst trying to illuminate alternative values in their understanding of autism.
Similarly, psychiatrist Suguru Hasuzawa (Kyushu University) reflected on the pragmatic transformation of the Japanese university clinics as students seek support for ‘job hunting depression.’ As psychotherapy becomes a tool to transform individuals into better job candidates, Hasuzawa asked, ‘When we treat students who have been hurt by job hunting and encourage their readjustment, are we promoting neoliberal subjectivation?’
Higher education beyond the clinic
Mental health language operates not only clinically but it also has political and institutional effects in higher education. Based on a collaborative student-led research project, Dominique Béhague (Vanderbilt University) showed how student groups advocated for curriculum diversity, removal of confederate insignia, and expansions of mental health care (Alsopp et al., 2023). Others shared how minority students use health care services procedurally to signal to universities: ‘I’ve done all the self-care you’ve told me to, now it’s your turn’ to change institutional norms.
Analysing institutional responses from UK universities, Felicity Callard (University of Glasgow) illustrated how the phrase ‘student mental health’ can be deployed for institutional control and liability, masking surveillance in the guise of care. University management appealed to student mental health as a means to disrupt higher education worker strikes, subverting political action through the language of student ‘wellbeing’. Callard argued that concerns over student mental health must be understood in the context of the university as a financial, academic, and corporate institution (Kotouza et al., 2021).
Investigating how the term ‘mental health’ is used in health promotion campaigns on US campuses, Gracie Wilson (University of Chicago) found that student peer support groups relied on an ambiguous and unspecific conceptualisation of ‘mental health’ that further stigmatises mental illness. A broad use of ‘mental health’ makes it more difficult to recognise individual lived experience or the shared context of distress.
What does it mean for a young person to be healthy?
Workshop participants offered moral and experiential insights into youth distress that challenge medicalised frameworks. Based on fieldwork with young women in South Korea, Jung Eun Kwon (University of Pittsburgh) explored young women’s suicide as a ‘long temporality’, showing how crisis is not exceptional, but a process embodied in the ordinary. Her work suggests that, rather than viewing suicide as an event centred on a direct cause, we look towards the experience of an ongoing, slow death. Based on fieldwork with youth in India, Stefan Ecks (University of Edinburgh) proposed that distress results from breakages in temporality and recursivity: social media enables constant documentation of moments while disabling the ability to inhabit them, sparking comparison and altering experiences of time.
Expanding this idea of health as mediation in the context of the American university, Philip Rosenbaum (Haverford College) offered an existential-relational model of development (Rosenbaum and Webb 2024) viewing student distress as produced partly through unfulfilled promises of the contemporary neoliberal university. Mirroring similar themes of comparison and value, Eileen Anderson (Case Western Reserve University) presented fieldwork in the United States and Belize to argue that the meaning of ‘normal’ has shifted toward the ‘ideal,’ creating emotional simulacra where young people aspire to versions of performance that cannot exist. Teresa Kuan (Chinese University of Hong Kong) suggested that we might think the desire to be ‘normal’ as an idiom of social distress, as a way of wanting to ‘co-articulate’ or engage with others.
The pursuit of social competence itself was discussed as having emerged as a source of anxiety. Amir Hampel (New York University Shanghai) described how social skills workshops in China reflect young people’s need to portray confident individuality in entrepreneurial contexts, where emotional regulation becomes cultural capital. Hsuan-Ying Huang (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) examined how Chinese social media platform Know Yourself (知我心理) distributes ‘therapeutic culture,’ where users seek self-knowledge by sharing relatable content, creating a sociality of reading through feeling like others experience the same things.
Attending closely to the moral dimension of youth experience with mental illness, Teresa Kuan (Chinese University of Hong Kong) showed, through her work on family therapy in China, how children maintain family cohesion using their own symptoms, such as a young woman with depression, which inadvertently serves as a tool—even an expression of ‘filial piety’— for managing her father’s drinking and gambling. Focusing on the experience of youth psychosis, Neely Myers (Southern Methodist University) described moral agency as the ability to act in a way that others recognise as good, reminding attendees that as young people are professionalised at ever-younger ages, opportunities to fail and struggle remain necessary developmental processes.
Conclusion
The workshop fostered new collaborations to conceptualise youth mental health across contexts and disciplines, prompting us to think about how we can understand shifting institutions, language, socialisation, technology, and paradigms of care. Greater attention to mental health issues arguably represents strides towards reducing barriers to care, yet as Ecks stated at the workshop, ‘we’re struggling to know what we’re looking at and what conceptual language to use. What, after all, is mental health?.’ To answer this, our workshop concludes, we must look to the range of tools, supports, and frameworks students use to make sense of their experiences, recognising that psychiatric language, while providing crucial vocabularies for suffering, cannot capture the full complexity of what it means for young people to flourish in contemporary academic institutions and societies.
This workshop was possible due to the generosity of the Provost’s Global Faculty Awards, the Susan and Richard Kiphart Center for Global Health and Social Development, the Center for International Social Science Research, the Nicholson Center, and the Center for East Asian Studies, all at the University of Chicago, as well as Keio University’s X Dignity Center and the Kakenhi grant JP21H05174.
About the authors
Gracie Wilson is a PhD student in Comparative Human Development at The University of Chicago. Her work explores student and institutional narratives of mental health, illness, and wellness on North American college campuses.
Momoko Katayama is a Master’s student in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, Tokyo. Her research explores recovery processes from illness, with a particular focus on how recovery unfolds among eating disorder patients in Japan.
References
Alsopp, M. S., et al. 2023. “Rethinking and remaking “the social”: co-production, critical pedagogy, and mental health among university students in the USA.” Critical Public Health 33(5): 723-734. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2023.2265049
Kotouza, D. et al. 2021. “Mapping Mental Health and the UK University Sector: Networks, Markets, Data.” Critical Social Policy, 42(3): 365-387. https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183211024820.
Rosenbaum, P. J. and R. E. Webb. 2024. “What’s Going on Around Here?: Applying a Developmental Perspective to the Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education.” Journal of College Student Mental Health, 38(4): 768-787, DOI: 10.1080/28367138.2024.2373952
