Understanding Physical Environmental Influences on Youth Mental Health

Learning Series Description

This learning series explores how the spaces where young people grow up—urban or rural, green or grey—can shape their mental health and psychosocial development. Through expert interviews and research insights from the CAMH Special Issue, the series highlights key environmental factors, protective influences, and opportunities for designing healthier environments with and for youth.

Description

This video provides a concise overview of the CAMH 2025 special issue, Physical Environmental Influences on Psychosocial Outcomes in Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults. Guest editors Dr Keri Wong, Dr Marta Francesconi, and Dr Steven Papachristou introduce the issue’s goals: to explain the growing relevance of this topic, summarise key findings, and challenge common misconceptions about the built environment. Drawing from diverse urban and rural examples, the video explores how factors such as green and blue spaces, air and noise pollution, walkability, housing quality, and neighbourhood design influence mental health along a continuum—from emotional regulation and cognitive growth to social connectedness and diagnosable disorders. The special issue brings together psychologists, architects, public-health experts, and urban planners through interdisciplinary collaborations, and centres youth-led, participatory research that anchors findings in lived experience. Highlighting original studies, action research, systematic reviews, debates, and commentaries, this collection offers new evidence, identifies critical gaps, and models how to co-design health-promoting environments with young people. In doing so, it reframes the physical environment not as a passive backdrop, but as an active contributor to mental wellbeing across the lifespan.

Learning Objectives

A. To understand how specific features of the physical built environment (green and blue space, air and noise quality, housing and street design) influence psychosocial outcomes in children, adolescents, and young adults.

B. To distinguish the built environment from social or individual factors, and to debunk common misconceptions about what “counts” as an environmental exposure in mental-health research.

C. To evaluate interdisciplinary, youth-led research models that bridge psychology, planning, public health, and design, illustrating how shared data and co-creation can enrich evidence and practice.

Paper Link

https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14753588/2025/30/2