At first, meditation and deep breathing were things Diya Patel used to help herself when she felt anxious or stressed.
Then she saw a close friend struggle with a mental health crisis. Patel realized she could help other young people going through similar circumstances.
“The thing is, life is just so fast-paced that sometimes we forget about preserving, like, our core, like, our mental health,” said Patel, a 17-year-old senior at Thales Academy, a private school in Apex. “It's just so important to recognize what is important in this fast-paced world, and to take a moment to just take a deep breath, step back from everything.”
While there are a growing number of programs meant to help youth with mental health issues, North Carolina teens and college students aren’t just relying on adults to come to the rescue. They’re starting their own YouTube channels to offer mindfulness techniques, designing a peer-led counseling program to be used in schools, and meeting with lawmakers to craft policies that would stop social media companies from using algorithms that target youth.
“We need to give young people autonomy to fix their own mental health issues,” said Ava Smithing, advocacy director with the Young People’s Alliance, which was started by two North Carolina high school students. “That is not to say we’re going to be able to fix them on our own, but you adults cannot fix it for us. They need to empower us to fix it for ourselves.”
A trusted source
Youth leaders in North Carolina told NC Health News that young people are more likely to open up to their peers than to adults.
“These are struggles that we are going through in our day-to-day life,” said Carmello Gilliam, a 15-year-old junior at Bertie Early College High School who helped create a proposal for a peer mental health program as part of NC Child’s Youth Advocacy Council. “Who better to give their opinion, and who better to give their input on the topic, than someone who actually lives it?”
A 2022 National Alliance on Mental Illness survey of youth showed that peers are a trusted source for mental health information. The poll found that 78 percent of U.S. teens ages 12 to 17 counted friends as a trusted source. Parents came in first at 95 percent.
In a separate report, also from 2022, the nonprofit Mental Health America focused on the need to expand community-driven mental health resources with youth and young adults at the helm.
“Peer support programs can empower youth to provide mental health support, reduce isolation, increase self-help skills, and empower other youth,” the authors wrote. “Additionally, youth involved in peer support programs and leadership roles can help create systems of services that better meet young people’s needs in the ways that matter to them.”
Gilliam also serves as a defense attorney in Bertie County’s Teen Court. The body allows teens with misdemeanor charges to go before a jury of their peers; sentences focus on rehabilitation and restorative justice.
He sees parallels in the work that teens do there advocating for their peers.
“The best person that can convey the story, if you can’t convey your own story, is someone who has that capability of understanding,” Gilliam said. “And I don’t personally believe an adult can wholeheartedly grasp the mental health struggles that [are] happening within youth.”
North Carolina youth have already been working on finding solutions to the mental health crisis affecting them and their peers.
Peer support proposal
Last year, the Youth Advocacy Council for NC Child picked mental health as the topic of a yearlong project because that’s where the biggest mental health crisis is taking place in North Carolina, said Parth Singh, a 15-year-old council member from Raleigh.
Involving other youth in the process is key.
“They’re the ones who can recall what’s worked for them in the past, what hasn’t worked, what they need to fix,” Singh, a sophomore at Green Level High School in Cary, told NC Health News. “And they’re the ones who could provide insights and perspectives that adults may not see.”
The council proposed piloting a peer-to-peer mental health support program in three high schools. The program involves training student volunteers to provide confidential, voice-only emotional support under professional supervision.
“This model offers a cost-effective, stigma-reducing first step toward mental health care for students in need,” the council said in its proposal.
In their report advocating for the initiative, the group cited two national peer-run support programs and one in California as examples of the success of youth helping youth. They argued that North Carolina needs this type of program — first because there is no statewide peer support infrastructure, and second because schools don’t have enough health professionals, such as school counselors, to help students.
Council members estimate it would cost $104,715 to fund the pilot.
Singh, who is in his second term on the council this year along with Gilliam, said he’s met with legislators and policymakers to talk about the youth council’s plan. He’s also spoken with educators, including some from rural school systems, to explore whether the program could work in different areas.
Singh plans to take the information and suggestions he’s received to his fellow council members in the hopes that they’ll take the plan to the next level — obtaining funding. What he heard from policymakers was encouraging.
“They’ve said that this has a real chance of getting funding if we advocate for it and push for it,” he said.
Social media and mental health
Today’s youth have practically grown up with a smartphone in hand, which means they’ve had access to a world of information, but also to a growing array of social media apps that studies show can be harmful to their mental health.
According to the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 use YouTube daily. Fifty percent or more use TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram daily, with 16 percent reporting they use TikTok almost constantly.
Young people also increasingly recognize that social media use can affect mental health.
The Pew Research Center’s latest survey of teens in 2024 found that 48 percent said social media sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32 percent in 2022.
The Young People’s Alliance has been fighting for several years to address the algorithms behind social media that they say target minors, reinforcing unhealthy behaviors and exacerbating mental health issues.
Co-founder Sam Hiner spoke about the need to restrict algorithms in a November 2023 meeting of the North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force.
He said social media can send young people into a dangerous spiral. Hovering too long over content about dieting, for instance, can lead to a person’s feed being inundated with unusual diet techniques and pictures of unrealistic body standards, he said.
“What ends up happening to a lot of these teens is their feeds become full of really harmful content,” Hiner said at the time. “And that’s all they see anymore because of the way the algorithm works.”
Since then, the group has continued to advocate for changing social media algorithms at the state and national levels. In the 2023-24 Congressional session, they convinced the U.S. Senate to amend the Kids Online Safety Act to let young users opt out of manipulative recommendation algorithms, but the House and Senate could not come to a compromise. The bill was resubmitted for the2025-26 session and still includes the opt-out language the Young People’s Alliance fought to get into the bill.
In North Carolina, the latest bill championed by the advocacy group was filed in March 2025. Senate Bill 514 would prohibit social media companies from using minors’ data for advertising or algorithmic recommendations. But the bill never progressed. Earlier versions of the bill also failed to move forward.
The latest technology causing concern is generative AI, Smithing said. It is being used to create what are called “chatbots” — software that can simulate written or spoken conversation. Some chatbots were created to serve as companions and others to act as therapists and offer advice.
The Federal Trade Commission has launched a study into the chatbots’ use after reports of teens dying by suicide after discussing their suicidal thoughts with a chatbot and, in one case, allegedly getting advice from the chatbot on writing a suicide note.
The Young People’s Alliance helped introduce a bill in North Carolina that would require AI chatbots that claim to be therapists to go through some form of licensing. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Jim Burgin (R-Angier), stalled in the Senate rules committee in March, the day after it was filed.
The group consistently advocates for other ways to help youth. They’re focused on three areas: affordability, opportunity and community.
“Most of our technology work falls in ‘community,’ looking at the way that social media is really eroding communities and isolating young people,” Smithing said. “What we’re seeing right now is young people just don’t have an outlet that isn’t their phone.”
The Young People’s Alliance has been holding listening sessions at its college and high school campus chapters across the country to see what topics are of interest to students.
“We find that young people are more honest when they’re talking to other young people,” Smithing said.
She said that in a recent round of discussions, one topic came up in every session: mental health.
Mindfulness techniques
In January, Patel launched a nonprofit and website where people can sign up for free training with her on meditation and mindfulness.
She shares mental health tips on social media and videos of breathing techniques on YouTube. One of the basics is called box breathing. As she describes the technique, Patel draws a box in the air with her finger — breathe in through the nose for four seconds, hold four seconds, exhale through the mouth for four seconds and hold for four seconds.
“A lot of youth don’t even know that they can do things like box breathing and meditation and just mindfulness techniques,” she said.
Sessions are usually 15 to 30 minutes. She’s also offered special meditation and neuroscience sessions. Students from her school attend — some in person — as well as youth from across the state, who attend virtually. Most are high school students, but there are also some middle school and college students.
Many of her friends and the students who join her sessions have a lot of anxiety, mostly tied to school, Patel said. They also get stressed about home life and job interviews, for example.
“Some people who join my sessions, they come before one of those stressful events,” she said. “One student came in before they had a speech they had to give to, like, 100 people. So I feel like sometimes it’s just important to cope when specific stressful events happen.”
She also launched a youth campaign for mindfulness through the Red Cross, where she’s a volunteer. That reached about 300 people, she said.
Other opportunities helped her get her mindfulness message out to even more youth. When she served as president/board chair of the National Association of Student Speakers, she directed members to mental health sessions like the ones she leads and to different techniques to use when they were stressed.
She also volunteers at a local hospital, where she met a 100-year-old patient who influenced her decision to help others master mindfulness techniques.
Patel asked the patient what advice she would give to her.
“If you want to have a happy life, preserve your mental health,” the woman told her.
Patel thought it was a beautiful sentiment — and appropriate for young people today.
She said students need to remember that, at the end of the day, their mental health is more important than a grade.
“Taking a step back and just viewing mental health is just so important,” she said.
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
