2026 Child & Adolescent Mental Health Conference (CAMH26)

2026 Child & Adolescent Mental Health Conference (CAMH26) is organized by Australian & New Zealand Mental Health Association (ANZMH) and will be held from Mar 16 - 18, 2026 at RACV Royal Pines Resort Gold Coast, Benowa, Queensland, Australia.

Theme:
Strong Minds, Safe Spaces: Mental Health, Identity and Connection in a Changing World

Description:
The 2026 Child & Adolescent Mental Health Conference (CAMH26) brings together a diverse network of professionals and advocates dedicated to the wellbeing of children, teens, families and communities.

This is your space to learn, share and connect with educators, clinicians, youth workers, researchers, policy leaders and people with lived experience from across Australia and beyond.

Through practical sessions and honest conversations, CAMH26 will explore how we can better support mental health, identity, and belonging for children and adolescents in a rapidly changing world. From creating safer spaces to strengthening resilience and connection, the conference will spotlight real solutions for the challenges facing young people today.

Foundations First: Mental Health in the Earliest Years (0–5):

• The first 2000 days: What children need to thrive, connect and grow
• Attachment, co-regulation and emotional safety in the early years
• Identifying and responding to early signs of mental health need
• Parental and caregiver mental health: Building strong foundations for children
• Integrating social and emotional wellbeing into early childhood education and care
• Designing integrated early years systems that connect health, care, and family supports

Digital Lives and Mental Health: Navigating Tech, AI, and the Evolving Online World:

• Likes, filters and digital self-esteem: Impact on identity
• Sextortion, grooming and digital exploitation
• Vaping, online trends and substance use: Digital drivers of distress
• The mental health impacts of a social media ban: Exploring early signals
• AI, telehealth and immersive tech: The future of care and support
• Co-designing safer online spaces with children and teens
• Digital fatigue and disengagement: When youth opt out
• Early exposure to social media and mental health in under 12s
• Innovating digital service models to meet youth where they are, safely and effectively

Breaking the Cycle: Trauma, Family Violence, and Abuse:

• Early trauma interventions in education and care settings
• Trauma-responsive practices for children reintegrating after family violence
• Adolescent use of violence in the home
• Integrating First Nations cultural healing into trauma models
• Addressing consent, coercion, and control in teen relationships
• Early recognition and intervention in family violence: what schools and services need to know
• Building trauma-responsive systems that support early identification and long-term care

Supporting the Workforce, Sustaining the Mission: Empowering the People Who Support Our Young People:

• Practitioner wellbeing: burnout, vicarious trauma, and recovery
• Building clinical confidence in early-career workers
• Rural and remote workforce challenges: models that work
• Supervision for multidisciplinary teams: best practice frameworks
• Professional development pathways for school-based practitioners
• Promoting educator mental health and sustainable practice
• Empowering the workforce to drive innovation and reform across youth mental health systems

Emerging Mental Health Challenges: Identity, Safety and Complex Realities for a New Generation:

• Navigating identity, intersectionality and mental health in a changing world
• Self-harm, suicidality and complex distress
• Eating disorders across the spectrum
• Consent, pornography and adolescent development
• Gendered violence and digital misogyny
• Creating gender-safe and identity-affirming spaces
• Designing inclusive mental health systems that address loneliness, isolation, and the complex realities young people face
• Designing flexible, inclusive systems that respond to complex and intersecting youth needs

Neurodivergence in Focus: Beyond Labels to Lived Experience:

• Neuroaffirming practice: beyond masking to authentic support
• Gender, masking and late diagnosis in neurodivergent youth
• Gaming, special interests and positive obsession: A deeper look at what works for neurodivergent minds
• Behaviour as communication: Reframing behaviours as expressions of need
• What helps after a diagnosis? Supporting families through post-diagnostic adjustment
• Social motivation in neurodivergent youth: Rethinking what belonging looks like
• Reforming systems to deliver truly neuroaffirming and accessible supports

Beyond the Curriculum: Building Responsive, Inclusive, and Resilient Learning Communities:

• Embedding mental health across the curriculum
• Whole-school approaches to creating mentally healthy learning environments
• Student-led mental health initiatives: supporting youth agency and peer-to-peer influence
• School refusal and re-engagement: new strategies and supports
• The evolving role of school psychologists and wellbeing coordinators
• Building mentally healthy school cultures through leadership and governance
• Alternative schooling models and mental health outcomes
• Approaches to preventing and responding to bullying
• Teaching respectful relationships: curriculum, challenges, and culture
• Embedding mental health reform into school systems, policy, and leadership structures

Families in Focus: Mental Health in the Home and Beyond:

• Whole-family mental health support: the role of family in integrated care
• Parenting under pressure: tools for co-parenting after separation
• Grandparents, kinship carers and non-parent caregivers: Filling the gaps in mental health-informed support
• Decoding distress: practical tools for parents to navigate emotions and behaviour
• Intergenerational healing: breaking cycles of trauma and disconnection
• Empowering culturally diverse families to navigate mental health services
• Co-designing family-centred mental health systems that are easy to access and navigate

Culturally Safe and Self-determined Care: Mental Health Across Diverse Communities:

• Cultural belonging and identity: mental health supports for First Nations and multicultural youth
• Decolonising mental health: power, policy and community control
• Culturally safe schools: strategies that support cultural identity and wellbeing
• Working with CALD youth: language, stigma and belonging
• Staying connected to country and culture while schooling away
• Transforming systems to support culturally safe, community-led models of care