Youth Mental Health Internship Project - Emily Yao

The end of the semester means that a handful of Get Involved internship projects have come to a conclusion. In this blog, we will be sharing details regarding Emily Yao, a junior at Palo Alto High School who worked on a project surrounding youth mental health.

Example of Survey Results

Emily originally started her project by doing research around mental health in the Bay Area, in an effort to empathize with the audience. She developed a survey that garnered 176 responses from high school students all around the Bay Area surrounding school mental health services and availability of current resources.

From the survey, she found that although most students said their school mental health resources were great, only around a quarter of them really utilized them. However, the bright side was that 85.7% of respondents found animals to provide emotional relief and 82.1% said nature did.

Emily Yao Interviewing Vicki Amon-Higa, Co-Founder and President of Animal Assisted Happiness.

With new information regarding how mental health could be improved among youth, Emily began conducting informational interviews in order to see what was being done currently by other organizations in the area. She interviewed members from Animal Assisted Happiness, Environmental Volunteers, Green Foothills, and Project Safety Net. Through these interviews, she was able to connect with people working in areas like nature, animals, and mental health.

After really understanding the problem and current solutions being implemented, Emily was able to narrow down her project. The final goal was to allow students to feel more comfortable receiving mental health support and to provide stress relief. After much brainstorming, she decided the best solution would be to help students get support in a nonprofessional setting.

Since then, Emily has been hard at work creating a website that documents mental health stories, compiling resources, and promoting organizations. She hopes that through her work, students will have an easier time accessing the mental health services that they need. See her full presentation here!