Our Hopes for JAACAP Open

Abstract

With the launch of JAACAP Open, we are thrilled to join the JAACAP family of journals and to facilitate expanded access to science generated in our field. We hope you are enjoying freely accessing, reading, and sharing the articles that we have published in JAACAP Open thus far. Our journal family aims to promote the well-being of children and families globally by publishing original research and papers of theoretical, scientific, and clinical relevance to the field of child and adolescent mental health that are openly available for broad readership. Child and adolescent mental health is in the spotlight now more than ever, with burgeoning demands for care after the pandemic¹ and challenges in accessing care, especially in underserved and rural communities. Associated with this is a growing list of challenges for children, adolescents, and their families, such as loneliness, negative experiences on social media, and increasing rates of suicide and gun violence that disproportionately affect historically marginalized youth and that are at the center of national policy discussions. To make an impact on practice and policy, we must increase the pace of high-quality evidence generation as well as its dissemination for use in clinical practice and policy development. Summarizing this path in a sentence is easy, but implementing it is hard. The challenges we face in child and adolescent mental health include the inherent complexities associated with evaluating dynamic clinical phenotypes, a limited set of evidence-based treatments, and profound limits in accessing such treatments. We are inspired by children, families, and colleagues who press forward all the same to make meaningful impacts on our field. Through broad dissemination, we hope to foster collaboration and to accelerate advancement of our field.