Mental Health Resolutions: How to Connect With Youth

Every year, by the time February rolls around, studies have shown that 80 percent of our new year's resolutions have fallen by the wayside. Beyond the obvious ones like working out or eating healthier, it is essential to reflect on some other resolutions, like focusing on our mental health and recommitting ourselves to sticking with it for the rest of the year.

Seeing Help With Mental Health

Coming to terms with any mental health struggle and seeking outside help is a major challenge and may be the biggest one we as mental health professionals face. Particularly for adolescents, there are a lot of factors they need to grapple with before finding their voice and asking for help. As society resumes life post-COVID-19, rising struggles with mental health has compounded the need for timely and efficient care and early intervention, particularly in our youth.

Add mental health struggles with general growing pains, it can be challenging for young adults to openly come to terms with what they are feeling or that they need help. Taking that scary leap to speak up and trust that the adults they come to will honor their privacy is no small step.

Overcoming Barriers

We need to educate and normalize mental health care. To do that, there needs to be an effort to have a greater, more effective presence online. In 2022, colleagues and I published research around targeted ads on social media that would appear on a youth or allies feed that could lead them to a mental health assessment with the ultimate goal of connecting them to a local doctor, if needed. What we learned from our research is that while many youths want support and need support, there are a host of barriers that get in the way. One surprising barrier is parents themselves because even though youths may want to explore professional support, they often need to rely on their parents to follow through.

We are now underway to take our research one step further. We are looking for ways to better understand the barriers and how to get around them. We know that we need to do a better job at giving adolescents what they need at the moment they are looking. Emphasizing the benefits of asking for help and highlighting the end result may help visualize a positive outcome. While there are many reasons not to seek care, the benefits certainly outweigh the risks for most.

The most important thing is to have actionable resources that are easy to digest and use. These resources can be geared toward both parents and youths.

Technology and the Internet are the gateways for this generation and those after to break the mental health stigma and remove the barriers preventing our youths from finding the care they need now.