Resilience, Ethnicity, and Adolescent Mental Health: Metadata and Documentation, 2015-2025

REACH (Resilience, Ethnicity, and AdolesCent Mental Health) is a school-based accelerated cohort study in inner-city London, UK. REACH comprises three cohorts which were established to provide detailed and extensive information on the nature, distribution, and determinants of mental health among young people from diverse backgrounds and densely populated inner-city areas. Specifically, REACH is designed to test several hypotheses concerning: (i) the extent, nature, and development of mental health problems among young people; (ii) variations by gender, ethnic group, and socioeconomic status; (iii) risk and protective factors; and (iv) mechanisms linking risk/protective factors and mental health.

The dataset comprises a wide range of information on mental health, putative risk and protective factors, and demographics and social circumstances. Linkages to data routinely collected by schools is ongoing. For a nested subsample, further information on mental health, social experiences and circumstances, social cognition, neurocognition, and hypothlamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation (cortisol from hair samples) is available.

To the best of our knowledge, REACH is the largest and most comprehensive contemporary study of mental health among young people from diverse inner-city areas in the UK. The highly diverse and representative REACH cohorts are drawn from two of the most densely populated and socioeconomically and ethnically diverse boroughs in England, Lambeth and Southwark, London. These boroughs consistently rank among the 20% most deprived boroughs in the country. The prevalence of adult mental disorders is around two times higher in these boroughs compared with national estimates. REACH provides important new data about the development and trajectories of mental health problems in diverse groups and investigates why, despite similar experiences and circumstances, some young people develop mental health problems whereas others do not. In doing so, REACH will inform the development of interventions to promote mental health and prevent mental health problems in young people from all backgrounds.