3 - (SYM 30) Lessons from Implementing EMPOWER Youth: A Digital Training Program for Diverse Frontline Providers to Support Adolescents with Internalizing Mental Health Challenges

An estimated 1 in 7 adolescents ages 10–19 experience a mental health condition globally (WHO, 2025), with a significant portion of these challenges being internalizing issues (Keyes and Platt, 2023). However, many of these adolescents will not receive treatment because of supply and demand barriers restricting access to standard specialist-delivered outpatient mental health services. The delivery of brief, stepped care interventions by non-specialist providers (NSPs) in settings where youth already engage could remedy many of these barriers and expand more equitable access to care (Hill et al., 2025). Further, digital approaches for scaling such interventions with NSPs in routine practice show promise in overcoming limitations of traditional in-person training models.

Building on these solutions, we developed the EMPOWER Youth training program: a digital curriculum that equips frontline youth-serving NSPs with a brief, stepped care intervention to address internalizing problems in adolescents ages 10–19. Providers are trained to deliver general mental health support to youth, as well as the two levels of care in the EMPOWER Youth intervention protocol, which includes a quick calming technique and condensed problem-solving procedure from the FIRST program (Weisz & Bearman, 2020).

After piloting the training’s feasibility and acceptability, the EMPOWER team is working closely with community partners in Texas (USA) and Japan to implement the training and deliver the intervention to youth. In Texas, the EMPOWER Youth program has been integrated into YWCA after-school programming. In Japan, EMPOWER Youth was adapted and used to train a new population of school-based NSPs in Tokyo. This presentation will discuss lessons learned from implementing the program in these diverse contexts. Findings include considerations for embedding mental health services within settings readily accessible to adolescents; strategies to support sustainment; the development of supervision tools to support high-quality NSP delivery; and the importance of engaging in participatory approaches with implementation partners and client populations.