New mental health & wellbeing tools – built just for teens
At YouTube, we’ve built specific age-appropriate experiences for our younger users for more than a decade. Today, we’re announcing our newest offering – mental health & wellbeing content in a dedicated surface built just for teens.
When seeking out age-appropriate information on common mental health and wellbeing topics like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and eating disorders, teens will now see a shelf of videos from trusted sources. Our goal is to make it easier for them to find credible information that is tailored to their developmental stage of life.
In Canada, these shelves will start rolling out for teens in the coming weeks. And this is only possible thanks to our partners. We worked closely with the pediatric health centre of Canada's capital, CHEO, and the outcome is inspiring: they created an educational video series on mental health called “This is what it feels like,” featuring five-time Juno-award nominated artist Jamie Fine, available in both English and French.
We also partnered with Horizon Health Network — who are early and crucial champions for our global teen mental health shelves, providing vital, evidence-based content—including a playlist breaking down addiction and mental health with expert advice, animations, and real-life tips—and ensuring equitable access to this trusted information for Canadian teens by offering it in both English and French.
For a video to be eligible for inclusion in the shelf, the content needs to be evidence-based, teen-centric and engaging. All of the organizations understand the importance of reaching teens on platforms where they already turn to for information, one of which is YouTube.
We’ve invested deeply over the years to help people who have questions about their health find information from high quality, credible sources – everything from health source information panels that let viewers know that the person they are hearing from is a licensed healthcare professional, to dedicated shelves of content for specific health conditions.
We’ve also invested specifically for teens, including working with our Youth and Families Advisory Committee to develop teen-specific guardrails on both recommendations and content. This work is all supported by industry-leading policies on what content is allowed on YouTube and what can earn ad revenue. We regularly update these policies and recently strengthened our guidance around content promoting eating disorders to better protect our users.
It’s important to everyone at YouTube that this is a platform where teens can safely explore their passions and also find answers to their questions - including questions about their health and wellbeing. As a doctor and father of four, it makes me happy to see so many health organizations from around the world recognize the role YouTube plays in helping to reach teens with health information when they need it.
