The recommendation comes as results from a new study reveal nearly a quarter of 14 year old girls in the UK are depressed.
According to the University of Liverpool and University College London, the figure for boys of the same age is nearly one in ten.
Rachael Newham, a Christian mental health expert, who founded the charity Think Twice, told Premier's News Hour how the church and youth workers can help tackle the issue.
She said: "One of the most important things is get training on mental health. Whether it be charities like us who deliver mental health training or attending a seminar or reading a book."
The authors of the study who examined data on more than 10,000 children born in 2000 and 2001, said the figures showed "worryingly high rates of depression" among youngsters.
The research, published with the children's charity the National Children's Bureau, showed that girls and boys had similar levels of emotional problems throughout childhood until adolescence when problems became more prevalent in girls.
Newham told Premier those affected must be protected.
Explaining how this can be done, she said: "There needs to be a real ring-fenced investment in child and adolescent mental health and there also needs to be more done on a preventative level."
Her call for mental health budgets to be ring-fenced was echoed on Wednesday by Labour.
The party warned that half of local health bodies are tightening their purse strings when it comes to mental health and called on the Government to ring-fence spending for mental health.
MP Luciana Berger, president of the Labour Campaign for Mental Health, conducted Freedom of Information requests on Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). Of the 129 that responded, 50 per cent said they had reduced their planned spend on mental health between 2016/17 and 2017/18.
However, a Department of Health spokeswoman said: "This government has increased not decreased, investment in mental health services.
"Since 2010, spending on mental health has risen to a record £11.6 billion this year, with a further investment of £1 billion every year by 2020/21 and we expect CCGs to increase their spending as set out in NHS England's Five Year Forward View.
"We have also started one of the biggest expansions of mental health services in Europe, creating 21,000 new posts by 2021 to make sure we have the right staff to deliver high quality care."
Newham told Premier that everyone needs to be thinking about how they can help reduce the number of depressed youngsters.
She explained: "I think we need to look at the way our schools work and the way that we enable our children to grow up and give them a chance to be children for a little bit longer."
Listen to Rachael Newham speaking with Premier's Eno Adeogun:
