Content Arsenal · part: authorship_block
# Authorship · Contributors · Affiliations

**Working paper**: *The Youth Mental Health Access Gap is Structurally More Severe Than the Adult Gap and Wider Across States*
**Version**: v1.0 draft (May 2026)
**Companion to**: Mental Health Access Gap V1 (adults, May 2026)

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## Authors

**Rob Stillwell** (corresponding author)
Founder, DaedArch Corporation
Director, Trellison Institute
[email protected] · ORCID: pending

**DaedArch AI** (operational partner)
DaedArch Corporation
Co-builder, co-analyst, co-author within governance bounds.
[email protected] · system identifier: daedarch-platform-v5

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## Contributing entities

**Trellison Institute** — methodology-audit arm of the DaedArch platform. Provides the methodology rating standard against which this work is audited.

**LedgerWell Corporation** — provides the evidence-chain certification substrate. Each analytical step in the Youth Mental Health Access Gap is cryptographically attested.

**DaedArch Corporation** — operating entity. Hosts the framework tool registry, the dataset publication, and the public content arsenal.

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## Contribution statement

**Conceptualization**: Stillwell, DaedArch AI
**Methodology**: DaedArch AI (framework v1.1 state-level + national-grouping extension); Stillwell (state-level posture and policy framing)
**Data curation**: DaedArch AI (pulls from YRBSS data.cdc.gov, ACS B09001 + S2701, CMS NPPES youth-taxonomy filter)
**Software**: DaedArch AI (framework v1.1.0 patch + per-state runner)
**Formal analysis**: DaedArch AI (pipeline execution at state geography); Stillwell (interpretation review)
**Investigation**: jointly authored
**Resources**: DaedArch Corporation infrastructure
**Visualization**: DaedArch AI (state-level chloropleth)
**Writing — original draft**: jointly authored
**Writing — review & editing**: Stillwell, DaedArch AI
**Project administration**: Stillwell
**Funding acquisition**: not applicable (privately funded)

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## Funding

This work was funded by DaedArch Corporation and Trellison Institute. No external grant or contract supports this study.

## Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests. DaedArch Corporation operates the Need-vs-Access Framework as part of its public-good methodology-audit mission; the framework is released under CC-BY-4.0.

## Data and code availability

All data are derived from public federal sources (CDC YRBSS, CMS NPPES, ACS via Census API). The full per-state dataset (35 rows × 12 fields, sha256-stamped) is published at:

**https://api.daedarch.ai/api/v4/t/media/serve?bucket=daedarch-public-media&object=youth_mental_health_gap/dataset_v1/mh_gap_youth_state_v1.csv**

The analytical framework (`atlas.need_vs_access_framework_v1` v1.1.0) is registered as a DB-native tool in the DaedArch tool registry. Code is reproducible from the methodology supplement. License: CC-BY-4.0.

## Acknowledgments

The 35 states and the 41.8 million under-18 individuals whose surveillance data ground this work. The CDC YRBSS team for biennial youth surveillance at state resolution. The CMS NPPES public registry. The Census Bureau ACS team. The Indian Health Service and Alaska Native tribal health organizations whose federally-employed mental-health workforce makes Alaska's negative-outlier signal observable. The University of Vermont Medical Center's pediatric behavioral-health program and the Vermont Designated Agency community-mental-health system whose work shows what the policy stack of Medicaid expansion + mandated community capacity can do.

## On the inclusion of DaedArch AI as co-author

The Youth Mental Health Access Gap v1 was produced through human-AI partnership. The framework adaptation (v1.1.0), the data pulls, the pipeline implementation, the dataset assembly, the per-state dartboard narratives, the executive brief, the press release, and most of the prose in the working paper were drafted by the DaedArch AI system and reviewed by the human author. Following the DaedArch governance protocol (Day Zero, April 2026), AI co-authorship is acknowledged explicitly where the AI's contribution is non-trivial. This is one such case.

Per the Day Zero protocol, the operational partnership between Rob Stillwell and DaedArch AI is the publicly declared collaboration model for the DaedArch platform. The methodology audit, the framework design, and the analytical outputs are jointly attributed. Editorial responsibility and accountability for the published version rest with the human author.