Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change. World Mental Health Day 2026 

This World Mental Health Day, we’re talking about all of the ways young people’s voices have shaped Best For You since it launched in 2021.

We talk about Best For You being a new approach to mental health care that’s designed in consultation with young people and their families – not just for them.

We ask young people about what’s actually affecting their wellbeing, what information they’re looking for online, and what makes a website like Best For You feel helpful and trustworthy. Those are things that adults can’t just guess.

And we know that young people also have lots of ideas about coping with their everyday lives. We ask young people for their tips for coping with things like everyday feelings, to make sure we’re sharing things young people find helpful – rather than ideas that only work in theory.

At the same time, we talk to NHS clinicians to find out about things like diagnostic criteria (specific guidelines about the signs and symptoms that mean someone has a mental health condition) and how different types of mental health support work. We can also ask them questions from young people – and share their answers so more people can find accurate information.

Since Best For You launched, we’ve engaged with over 3,500 young people. We haven’t done this all in one go – it’s been a gradual process of getting ongoing feedback about how we can improve.

Over the past five years, we’ve spoken to young people through:

We think it’s important to have a mix of approaches.

Surveying lots of young people in one go has helped us to get a clearer picture of the things that were affecting young people’s mental health, where young people were looking for information and support, and what sort of help and support young people needed most. We’ve also been able to work with experts to design our surveys to make sure they reach a diverse group of people.

On other occasions, speaking to a smaller number of people in more depth gives us specific information that we shapes how the website works or informs the content of a website page or video.

In our 2026 survey, we asked young people about the barriers to accessing mental health support. The most common barriers they told us about were not knowing how to get support (31% of young people) and not knowing which service could help with their problem (32% of young people).

Our support finder is designed to help with this. You can filter the support by where you live, your age, what you’re struggling with, and the type of support available.

Everything on the tool is free, and we make it really clear whether you can refer yourself. Crucially, we use a combination of technology and human review to check all of the information regularly and keep it up to date.

The idea of filters so you can quickly find the support that’s relevant to you first came from Hammersmith and Fulham Youth Council, who told us how overwhelming it was to be signposted to too many options at once – especially if you have to figure out which options are open to you.

Young people also told us that they wanted to find the projects and services that are specific to their local area, so local services come up before national helplines in search results.

The look and feel of a website is really important – so we asked young people what they’d prefer.

87% of the young people in our consultations said they’d rather have illustrations than photos. They told us that illustrations felt ‘calmer’ and ‘more comforting’, that they’re ‘easier to see yourself in’, and that they ‘help keep it more personal and inclusive’.

To make sure we had enough illustrations for the new website, we commissioned bespoke artwork from illustration students at the University of Westminster. We worked with five fantastic illustrators, who created a range of illustrations for the website.

We also asked young people about how we should use colours on the website. They told us that we needed to have a careful mix of colours, including that ‘calm colours feel welcoming’ but ‘bright [colour] attracts people and brings their attention to specific places’.

We know that social media is a complicated topic – people have different relationships with social media, and the future social media ban will affect young people too.

In both of our surveys, young people told us that they were using social media – especially YouTube. In 2022, 75% of young people told us that they commonly engaged with YouTube, and in 2026, YouTube came second (behind search engine results) when we asked young people which platforms they most trusted to get health and wellbeing information.

Our videos sit on YouTube’s health shelves, which appear at the top of search results to help young people access content from verified health sources and avoid misinformation.

Mental health and wellbeing is a big topic – so how does Best For You decide what to cover when?

We’re always adding more content, and we decide what to cover based on what young people tell us they’re looking for (alongside other data that tells us about the most common searches on search engines and websites like YouTube, and news stories that are relevant to young people).

When we started talking to young people about the new Best For You website, it became clear they were looking for content about mental health conditions (like depression and anxiety) as well as life challenges that were affecting their wellbeing (like body image and social media).

We’ve made content covering these things, as well as information about getting NHS mental health support, supporting other people, and things everyone can do to look after their wellbeing.

In our 2026 survey, for example, 46% of young people said they’d experienced friendship or relationship problems in the past 12 months, making them the most common ‘life challenge’. 

We also make content based on news stories that affect young people – like those announcing the social media ban earlier this year, or the recent report that talked about young people as ‘the loneliest generation’. We think it’s important that young people can find accurate, accessible information that tells them the most important things behind the headlines.

Hearing young people’s voices isn’t something we do once or twice a year – or just for World Mental Health Day!

We get ongoing feedback about Best For You by:

This ongoing feedback and information about young people’s experiences help to shape the decisions we make every day.

We want to make sure that it’s easier for young people to access the help and support they need for their wellbeing as quickly as possible – and that starts by listening to young people and hearing what they say.