How architecture can help youth mental health

The kids are not OK.

According to Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the most recent U.S. surgeon general, there is a youth mental health crisis. Isolation, social media, and parasocial relationships have left many children lacking the social skills to cope, and the built world can be an overstimulating sensory experience for many and a less nourishing social space for others. These stats frame a challenging future for our next generation:

• Suicide rates among those aged 10–24 rose by 57% from 2007 to 2018.
• More than 33% of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness between 2009 and 2019.
• One in five American children, aged 3–17, has been diagnosed with a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder. 

While many cities and states are evolving their policies to address these needs, design also has a role to play in supporting youth mental health. The built environment can help or hinder healing, so architecture must aspire to intentionally elevate the mental well-being of our children from the classroom to the patient room and beyond.

Tools like adverse childhood experience (ACE) scores, trauma-informed design, and neuroinclusive approaches have elevated methods of practice. That’s good news, because architects and designers have a role to play as design advocates for children and young people in crisis. Awareness of the following trends, projects, and resources can help you prepare to be such an advocate.

Improving spaces for youth in crisis

Children’s hospitals have begun amending their projects mid-design to make patient rooms more sensory-enabled and psychologically safe. Emergency departments are not just spaces for acute medial traumas to be resolved, a la The Pitt, but can be empathetic, sensory-enabled, and experiential spaces. As evidenced by the EmPATH model pioneered by Dr. Scott Zeller and others, the environment of care is a medicine all its own.

Recently, a multidisciplinary design and research team from South Carolina received a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to tackle the challenge of providing safe, effective, and human-centered care for pediatric mental and behavioral health patients in the emergency department. An additional goal was improving provider well-being. Clemson University partnered with Prisma Health to develop systems solutions that include a flexible exam room, better process flows, and tele-psychiatry solutions. The team received input from subject matter experts in the design of behavioral health environments.

Texas A&M has embarked on similar research into adolescent crisis environments. And overall, hundreds of crisis centers are in development across North America to address this need. The new Northern Virginia Adolescent Treatment Center in Fairfax, Va. is one such example. Abroad in England, the National Health Service is exploring design recommendations for the mental health of children on existing and new pediatric wards.

Moving upstream

The trend is moving upstream to spaces beyond acute psychiatric care. Austin Independent School District has developed education specifications with mental well-being and counseling spaces in new and existing schools. This includes dedicated, multi-occupant sensory spaces for people to learn self-regulation and other coping techniques while overcoming the stigma of seeking help. These spaces’ ease of accessibility is important: If services are more accessible and spaces are more welcoming by design, visitors experience less stigmatization and othering.

And in 2025, a special edition of the UK-based It’s Not Rocket Science series explored better practices for designing spaces for those on the autism spectrum. There any many lessons to be learned from our peers abroad and how design can champion impactful changes for hyper or hyposensitive individuals of all ages and walks of life. Design research is catching up in the U.S. For instance, Texas A&M University has released a research paper (under peer review) on the benefits of multi-sensory spaces for youth needing tele-health services. 

As each successive generation is more digitally native, with more of their health and education serviced in a hybrid format, we’ll need the built environment to reflect sensory-enabled architecture (SEA) principles. This goes beyond catering to the five senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. 

Our hidden senses are the next frontier of design for mental and behavioral health. Those hidden senses are vestibular movement (which helps people balance), proprioception (which lets people sense their movements), and interoception (which lets people receive internal signals like hunger).

Looking ahead

The International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University is pioneering this industry-wide effort with their Intentional Spaces Initiative, which proposes that “intentional design, architecture, and aesthetic experiences hold enormous potential to address some of the most intractable issues facing our planet.” The initiative involves a collaboration with the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture at the Salk Institute, and it features multiple industry leaders from diverse firms and design organizations who have come together to make their knowledge more accessible. Many of its resources are already available online.

While the kids may not be OK, each community is finding unique ways to address child and youth mental health in their own unique ways. By contributing to research projects and designing with intention, architects and designers are meeting that call to action. 

Stephen N. Parker is an AIA Young Architect Award recipient and a mental and behavioral health design leader based in Washington, D.C.