Towards mental health friendly cities during and after COVID-19

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ABSTRACT

COVID-19 and the resultant stringent control measures have increased social isolation, loneliness, and domestic violence, and generated feelings of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. Over the past two years, citiesRISE, a global platform that engages youth leadership in mental health system reform, has developed a holistic model for youth mental health and operationalized it through the Mental Health Friendly Cities (MHFC) framework. Using this framework, we surveyed youth from the five cities early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and identified critical needs, based on which we recommend research and programming priorities towards post-COVID-19 Mental Health Friendly Cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental health
• youth
• COVID-19
• cities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Moitreyee Sinha

citiesRISE is a multi-stakeholder initiative that includes many of the world’s leading experts and practitioners working with young people to enhance coping by increasing hope and resilience, to foster connectedness, and to improve access to a caring ecosystem for youth through a network of cities in order to address the large and rising global burden of mental ill health. It is a global platform using a local collective action model that is dedicated to scaling up mental health enhancing interventions and models that have been developed in recent years, through proven methodologies of collective action and a network approach. http://cities-rise.org.