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.
For a video to be eligible for inclusion in the shelf, the content needs to be evidence-based, teen-centric and engaging. To meet these requirements, we worked with organizations from around the world who specialize in providing mental health and wellbeing information for teens to produce the videos. All of the organizations understand the importance of reaching teens on platforms where they already turn to for information, one of which is YouTube. In India, these shelves will start rolling out for teens in the coming weeks.
The National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), India's premier mental health institution under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, has developed a video series "ManoSandesh" to highlight authoritative mental health guidance. The series features leading mental health experts, researchers, and patient advocates that answers common questions like "How can I talk to my teenager about stress and anxiety?"
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: our Youth Digital Wellbeing Initiative supports a unified vision for the development of high quality, age-appropriate content that can have a positive impact on young people’s lives. And, we continue working with partners and experts to develop resources for healthy screen habits for teens and teen-specific guardrails on both recommendations and content.
All of this is backed up with industry-leading policies that details what isn’t allowed on YouTube, and what isn’t eligible to earn ad revenue. We continuously review those policies to make sure they are keeping pace with the types of content we see on our platform – for example, we recently tightened our monetization policy for content that details or promotes disordered eating behaviors, to prevent this type of content from growing on YouTube.
It’s incredibly important to everyone at YouTube that this is a place where teens can safely explore their passions and interests, and find helpful answers to their questions. As a doctor and father of four who has focused my career on the best ways to help people make informed decisions about their health, I am excited that so many health organizations from around the world recognize the indispensable role that YouTube plays in the life of teens, and how our platform can help to reach them with health information when they need it.
