YouTube Launches Dedicated Mental Health Resource Section for Teenagers

YouTube has announced a new mental health section for teenage viewers, creating special video "shelves" that provide adolescents with age-appropriate information about topics such as depression, anxiety, ADHD and eating disorders.

These video shelves will appear when users with teen accounts perform mental health-related searches. In YouTube's blog post, a search for "depression" returns video resources from The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that works to protect emotional health and prevent suicide, and the United Kingdom's National Health Service.

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YouTube is the most-used social media platform among teenagers, with nine out of 10 surveyed teens saying they regularly browse the user-generated video site. That means more teenagers engage with YouTube than with Snapchat, Instagram and even TikTok.

Users from the United Kingdom may see videos from the National Health Service.

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"Outside of Google, YouTube is the single biggest driver of outreach to our helpline," said Johanna S. Kandel, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders CEO. "When teens are looking for answers, they often turn to YouTube -- and YouTube helps connect them directly to us."

YouTube has partnered with multiple mental health nonprofits and government organizations for the new program. Videos included are designed to be "evidence-based, teen-centric and engaging," according to YouTube's blog post.

Resources from the National Alliance for Eating Disorders, The Jed Foundation and the Child Mind Institute are included in YouTube's teenage mental health video shelves.

The teenage mental health video shelves are just one piece of a larger policy shift for the YouTube platform. Other recent changes include a community guidelines rule that clamps down on content that promotes eating disorders and teen-specific recommendations and guardrails that block explicit content.

The program's initial rollout will begin over the coming weeks, as the teenager-focused mental health resources will start appearing in feeds for people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, France, and Australia.

A representative for Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.