The Early Years

Our efforts developed after a concerned father came to researchers at Columbia University and expressed an interest in the work being done there to identify youth at risk for suicide. Having experienced a death from suicide and mental illness in his own family, this parent decided to personally support Columbia’s efforts to offer mental health checkups to families around the country, in the hope that others might be saved the pain experienced by his own family.

The TeenScreen Program was first developed in 1991 in response to research revealing that 90% of youth who die by suicide suffer from a mental illness at the time of their deaths, and that 63% experience symptoms for at least a year prior to their deaths. This study was among the first to shatter the myth that suicide is a random and unpredictable event. It also highlighted the fact that we have ample time to intervene with at-risk youth and connect them with the mental health services that can save their lives.

TeenScreen was developed with these facts in mind and its effectiveness was evaluated. Research showed that the program was effective in identifying youth at risk for mental health problems and that most of the youth identified through the screening were not previously known to have problems. After the conclusion of the program’s evaluation, TeenScreen was transformed from a research-based initiative to a public health initiative that could be implemented in an efficient and cost-effective way by schools and communities throughout the country.

Expansion from Schools to Primary Care Settings

The foundation of our early efforts focused primarily on mental health screening in school-based settings. Since schools have a natural system in place to reach out to teens and their parents to offer this type of programming, TeenScreen in school and community-based locations quickly became our most successful effort to date, with local sites offering free mental health checkups to more than 500 schools and communities throughout the country. This effort maintains our traditional TeenScreen model and is currently known as TeenScreen Schools and Communities.  

Building upon our success in schools and communities, we have more recently started to expand our efforts to primary care settings. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends routine mental health checkups for all adolescents; medical professionals, including pediatricians, family physicians and pediatric nurse practitioners, are in a unique position to screen for depression and other mental illnesses among their teen patients as part of their routine medical care. To help comply with these guidelines, we now offer a mental health checkup initiative specifically designed to assist medical professionals with implementing mental health screening in primary care settings, called TeenScreen Primary Care.

TeenScreen National Center for Mental Health Checkups at Columbia University

The TeenScreen Program has evolved from a program that almost exclusively operated in school-based settings into the TeenScreen National Center for Mental Health Checkups at Columbia University, whose mission is to reduce teen suicide and the impact of mental illness for adolescents, by offering scientifically-validated mental health screenings as a part of routine health care and producing greater access to mental health checkups for youth throughout the country. The center’s primary objective is to help young people and their parents through the early identification of mental health problems, such as depression.

To learn more about the launch of the National Center, click here.