Amina Fazlullah
Head of Tech Advocacy Policy, Common Sense
Internet Connectivity Can Help Solve the Youth Mental Health Crisis
Congress has an opportunity to ensure young people everywhere have access to vital online mental health resources.
According to our new research published today in partnership with Hopelab, young people in Black and Latino communities report increased reliance on online resources for mental and behavioral health. And this raises the importance of internet access in enabling greater access to health care.
For kids and teens in the digital divide, resources like telemedicine and online therapy may be out of reach due to a lack of consistent high-speed internet at home. The responses from the young people in our report show that online resources like social media, teletherapy, and mental health apps are a vital lifeline to those who face economic, cultural, geographic, and societal barriers to care. Of the young people we surveyed, 65% have searched online for behavioral health topics, and over 25% have attended online therapy—with the majority of them finding it helpful.
These online resources serve an important role in providing care to teens and young adults in a time of critical need. In October 2021, medical professionals declared youth mental health a national crisis. The stress, isolation, and trauma of the pandemic resulted in emergency services across the country seeing a dramatic increase in visits for mental health services. Since then, the crisis has not abated, and unfortunately, more than half of the U.S. population lives in an area with a shortage of mental health professionals. While in-person mental health services were back up to 75% of their pre-pandemic levels by August 2022, telehealth visits were 2,300% higher.
Communities without a sufficient number of health care providers are largely lower-income, and many are in rural areas that make it even more difficult to afford and access any mental health care. These same communities also lack access to affordable, high-speed internet service that enables telemedicine, a less expensive and more convenient option for those who would otherwise be required to travel long distances to see a provider in person.
On the positive side, Congress made investments to counteract these challenges. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) funding for broadband infrastructure, through the BEAD program, and affordability, through the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), was designed to ensure that all households have access to high-speed internet capable of supporting bandwidth-intensive services like telemedicine—while simultaneously ensuring that lower-income families can afford monthly service, promoting the continuity of care that is so critical to mental health treatment. But on the negative side, Congress neglected to keep funding the ACP at the end of May, even though it had been instrumental in bridging the digital divide with a consistent subsidy for high-speed internet service and had connected thousands to telehealth services.
The ACP supported one in six Americans in rural, suburban, and urban areas and across the demographic and political spectrum to get and stay online. This lapse forces approximately 77% of ACP households to choose between cutting spending on necessities like groceries or losing service entirely, disrupting their ability to access health care.
Thankfully, Congress has an opportunity to prevent these households from losing access to vital online therapy and medical resources. Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress to support additional funding for the ACP. Congress should act swiftly this session to pass the extension of the program and ensure that the vulnerable kids and teens who relied on the ACP for access to health care and teletherapy continue to receive the support they need.
Brenna Leasor, tech policy counsel at Common Sense, contributed to this article.
Amina Fazlullah is the Head of Tech Advocacy Policy in Common Sense Media's D.C. office where she works on a range of issues including expanding affordable access to technology, privacy, platform responsibility, artificial intelligence, and digital well-being. Before joining Common Sense Media, Amina was a tech policy fellow at Mozilla, where she worked to promote broadband connectivity in underserved communities (tribal, rural, and refugee communities) around the world. She has testified before committees in the U.S. House and Senate on technology issues impacting vulnerable consumers, kids, and families. She has been featured by the press and at conferences on issues related to broadband competition, Section 230, the digital divide, and dark patterns. She has published multiple research reports about the scale, cost, and solutions for addressing the digital divide and ensuring digital equity. She is a member of the FCC’s Consumer Advisory Committee and served as a founding board member of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance