Director, Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing
Impact: Reshaping the treatment paradigm for youth mental illness

We are grateful for the work of Dr. Steven Adelsheim, Director of the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing. Dr. Adelsheim has been a thoughtful and determined champion for early, intensive intervention with young people at risk of brain illness and for integrating those services into school and community settings.

He has championed Australia’s “headspace” model of youth health care and is working on pilot projects to adapt the model for California. Australia subsidizes headspace clinics in urban and rural communities nationwide, where young people ages 12-25 can drop in for low-cost physical and mental health care. These are community hubs that serve as social centers and offer a seamless, stigma-free connection between physical and mental health services. Dr. Adelsheim also leads the U.S. national clinical network for early psychosis programs called PEPPNET, an expert coalition dedicated to highlighting best practices around detection, prevention and treatment of psychosis-related illness.

His work promotes a vision for adolescent health care that emphasizes rapid response, community education and the use of new technologies to provide real-time support. It’s the paradigm shift we need to bring California into the next generation of care.