Supporting Families and Youth in Navigating Mental Health Services

Despite the availability of mental health resources in New York City, a critical gap remained in connecting residents to care. When families or adolescents seek help, they are often met with complex systems and clinical jargon. For families or adolescents reaching out for mental health support, the first encounter with the system often sets the tone for everything that follows. If that encounter is confusing—if it’s full of clinical language, complex eligibility criteria, or fragmented service information—it doesn’t just slow people down. It can stop them entirely. This complex service information can inadvertently become a barrier to entry, leaving those seeking help frustrated and disconnected from the care they urgently need.

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH) Bureau of Children, Youth, and Families saw an opportunity to make their communication about mental health services more accessible as part of the process of developing a new service navigation platform for all New Yorkers.

They engaged Health+ Studio to help them ground their ongoing community-facing activities in real community feedback and to translate that feedback into messaging.

Uncovering Barriers

To uncover the barriers preventing families from accessing care, Health+ Studio designed a community engagement strategy to listen directly to parents and adolescents navigating mental health services, as well as service providers who help families navigate these services.

This strategy included:

• In-Depth Community Listening: Health+ Studio designed and led a series of one-on-one, in-depth interviews with the true experts of the system: youth, parents, primary caregivers, and service providers.
• Ensuring Diverse Representation: To authentically represent New York City’s complex and diverse fabric, we recruited interviewees from various mental health programs and advisory groups. This ensured a diverse set of participants across age, gender, sexual identity, race/ethnicity, and lived experience with the mental health system.

Insights for Action

The Health+ team analyzed the rich qualitative data to identify key themes and communication barriers, using these insights as the groundwork to develop community-facing materials and activities.

Key outcomes from the work included:

• Strategic Guidance: The project provided the health department with clear recommendations for content that uses language that is easy to read and accessible, ensuring that complex service information does not become a barrier to entry.
• Community Engagement and Materials Development: The insights gathered are directly shaping how the department engages with youth and families, helping community members navigate the system to find the mental health services they need.

NYC DOHMH was experiencing a challenge that many well-resourced institutions face: the way information is organized and expressed from the inside does not always match the way people experience it from the outside.

Closing that gap required going directly to the people on the outside and asking them what they needed. That listening is what made the work credible and the recommendations actionable.

Sometimes the most important thing a system can do is learn how to explain itself.