With youth mental health worsening, California has launched a new initiative to help kids access free treatment.
The over $4 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI), part of Governor Newsom’s Master Plan For Kids’ Mental Health announced in 2022, aims to fight the youth mental health crisis through free telehealth apps offering peer support, health care system navigation aid and connection to local providers.
Between 2019 and 2021, about 1 in 3 California adolescents aged 12 to 17 reported symptoms that met the criteria for serious psychological distress, according to a statewide survey.
National estimates suggest that one in two adolescents are affected by a mental health disorder, with nearly half of these first appearing before 14 years of age.
As these numbers rise, youth statewide are not getting the care they need.
Of the 284,000 youth diagnosed with depression in California, for instance, 66 percent did not receive treatment during adolescence.
Meanwhile, suicide rates for Californian youth aged 10 to 18 increased 20 percent between 2019 and 2020.
The initiative
“To help kids get the help they need — and to address a nationwide shortage of providers that often cause long wait times — we’ve launched two mental health apps, BrightLife Kids and Soluna, offering free support to parents, caregivers and kids living in California, regardless of insurance status,” said Autumn Boylan, Deputy Director of the Office of Strategic Partnerships at the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), at a Tuesday, December 10 state-held briefing on the initiative.
BrightLife Kids offers free support to families with kids up to age 12 including coaching for sleep issues, anxiety, social skills and family caregiving coordination through live one-on-one video chats, direct messaging and on-demand content.
Coaches are bilingual in English and Spanish, and caregiver users have access to translation up to over 17 languages.
For Californians aged 13 to 25, Soluna offers multilingual one-on-one text and video chats with user-selected coaches, with a one-minute average wait time; peer discussion forums; interactive journaling, breathwork, mood log and goal-setting tools; mental health quizzes, videos and articles; health care system navigation support, including dental and vision; and even help in finding other resources like local food banks, housing aid, transportation and even cooling centers.
The free resources are currently state-funded through June 30, 2027 and available for download on the App Store and Google Play, requiring an in-state zip code for signup.
“When my own child was experiencing mental health challenges, it was tricky navigating a complicated health system alone,” said Boylan. “And when we were talking to young people leading up to the launch of these apps, we heard clearly that they don’t necessarily want to talk to a licensed practitioner right away, but to peers and near-peers that can understand their lived experience.”
“So it made sense to offer upstream, early-intervention support to youth who may not necessarily have a mental health diagnosis, but who need skills to cope with everyday-life stressors and let them know they’re not alone … which would also take some pressures off understaffed practitioners statewide. Then, for kids who need more support, we connect them to these practitioners through these apps,” she added.
Community stories
“I’ve worked with Dr. Diana, a family physician and mother who was completely skeptical about this program but signed up because her child was dealing with tantrums and aggressive behavior like biting,” said Brando Menjivar, a senior coach for BrightLife Kids. “Through coaching to support her child, not only did his behavior improve, but so did communication with her husband about their best parenting approach.”
“The more I work with caregivers and kids, the more I realize that sometimes we fight our emotions. The first step is labeling these emotions so we can be aware of them and identify their triggers … and accept that experiencing, say, grief or stress isn’t bad. It becomes bad when we don’t manage it, and it just sits there and turns into something worse,” he continued.
Most standard medical textbooks attribute 50 percent to 80 percent of disease to stress-related origins.
“The concept I love to teach kids dealing with big emotions is of being the surfer who swims toward the big wave to ride it, rather than swimming away,” Menjivar added. “Toward the end of our coaching, Dr. Diana said ‘Nobody teaches you how to be a parent in med school.’ She had all this physical knowledge, but didn’t know how to connect the dots so she and her child could make space to accept their emotions.”
“I grew up in a pretty traditional Latino household, so mental health was a taboo subject. It was rarely talked about,” said Yasmin, a Soluna coach. “And as a teenager, I experienced a lot of traumatic events and felt really alone in my suffering. For the longest time, I just questioned why I was going through it. It wasn’t until I learned about the peer support model in college when it clicked — all the emotional challenges I went through were so that I could help other people.”
“I share my story because it’s one that all our peer support specialists have. We all have lived mental health struggles that fuel us to support other people,” she continued. “And our coaching sessions are goal-based, so whether our users want to have 10 sessions, or just come in for one single session, all our coaches have a solution-focused approach to help create actionable steps for change.”
Describing the need for these services, Moa Kim, a counselor at Koreatown Youth Community Center in Los Angeles, said “I have a Korean American fifth grade student, born and raised in Koreatown, who comes for rehab services, and he and his mom come in for therapy as their relationship has been strained, because they feel like they can’t communicate well with each other, especially when they’re angry.”
“She’s very overworked from her job, and her husband is often unavailable due to his job, and he expects her to be the primary caretaker for their son, so she’s struggling with their child’s emotional outbursts, and then she frequently loses her temper, which only worsens the situation, and she feels too drained to practice peaceful parenting or prioritize self-care,” she continued.
“So her son, who is very sensitive and bright, has turned to gaming as a coping skill. So now, every time he and his mom fight, he shuts himself in his room. And his mom recognizes the need to spend more quality time with her son, but feels too overwhelmed to make those changes,” Kim explained. “We’ve been providing help and parenting tips but can only meet them once a week — so she feels unsupported.”
“This is just one example of countless youth and families with similar struggles throughout California that this initiative is going a long way to help,” she added. “To deal with these mental health issues, kids need help learning to communicate them … that’s what these apps are here for.”
