The National Conference on Child Psychiatry (NCPC) 2025, held at SKIMS Medical College Hospital (MCH), Bemina, ended with an urgent and unequivocal message that we can no longer afford to treat child and adolescent mental health as a peripheral issue. What has emerged from the two-day gathering of mental health professionals, educators, and policy experts is a stark call to action that demands immediate, coordinated, and systemic reform across both the health and education sectors. The mental health crisis is real. Anxiety, depression, behavioural disorders, and suicide among children and adolescents are on the rise across the country and J&K is not immune. The mental health of our youth is under siege, and the institutional response so far has been fragmented at best, and dangerously negligent at worst. Against this background, NCPC 2025 was not merely a professional conference; it was a mirror held up to a system that is failing its most vulnerable citizens. Key among the recommendations was the pressing need to forge lasting collaboration between schools and mental health services. This cannot be reduced to a well-meaning slogan or pilot project. Schools must become the first line of defence in identifying, supporting, and referring children with psychological distress. Teachers, counsellors, and school administrators need robust training, not token workshops. Mental health support must be embedded in the educational ecosystem with the same seriousness as academic performance. On the health sector’s side, the lack of infrastructure is staggering. Our country has fewer than 0.05 child psychiatrists per 100,000 population—a statistic that should spark outrage, not indifference. The shortage of trained professionals is complicated by social stigma, poor access to services in rural areas, and a gross underinvestment in mental health budgets. If this chasm has to be bridged, we need aggressive investment, state-backed incentives for specialization in child psychiatry, and the rapid scale-up of community-based services. NCPC 2025 also reignited a long-ignored conversation around accountability. The absence of mental health metrics in school evaluations, the minimal enforcement of mental health mandates under the National Education Policy, and the silence around child trauma in policymaking are all symptoms of a system that refuses to take mental health seriously. We must move beyond conferences, committees, and position papers. What is needed is political will, budgetary commitment, and inter-sectoral action. Mental health care for children is not a luxury—it is a non-negotiable foundation for national development. NCPC 2025 should be remembered not as another event, but as the point at which all of us finally stopped talking and started building. Our children can neither wait not afford our apathy.