Young people around the world are experiencing an unprecedented crisis of unhappiness and poor mental health. My research – and that of some others – shows that hope is a key factor in health and longevity, productivity, educational attainment and stable social relationships, among other things. Psychiatrists, for example, while they don’t provide examples of how to restore hope, note that it is the critical first step to recovering from mental illness. I hope that we can now use the metrics as one of the tools we need to solve the mental health crisis among our young people. As I noted earlier, the causes of the youth mental health crisis – in the US and beyond – are deep and far reaching, and defy simple solutions.