When a 22-year-old from the "SocialsVoice" study watched a man dismiss depression as "made-up sh*it," she had a clarifying realization: "It is self-preservation, but only being able to self-preserve and survive day after day instead of living makes a depressed person." Her response captures something researchers are just beginning to understand—that for Latino youth navigating social media across multiple languages and cultures, the mental health impacts are deeply complex, neither entirely harmful nor wholly supportive, but a constant negotiation between the two.
A new book titled "SocialsVoice," led by Melissa DuPont-Reyes, assistant professor of epidemiology and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, is elevating the voices of young people who have been too often sidelined from these crucial conversations. Rather than relying on surveys or data harvested from apps, the research team took an uncommon approach: they asked 41 Latino youth between ages 13 and 24, along with 28 of their parents recruited from community-based organizations across the United States, to become researchers themselves.
The youth didn't simply answer questions. They scoured social media for clips that had affected them—both positively and negatively—and analyzed together what made certain content helpful or harmful to their mental health. Over seven video-chat sessions, they dissected dozens of examples. A 17-year-old male participant found value in a TikTok video where a woman discussed giving herself time to process her feelings, recognizing that "this clip can educate others on how important it is to allow ourselves time to deal with our problems and not just set them to the side or ignore them." Elsewhere, they identified the constant threat of stigmatizing content—posts minimizing depression, reinforcing stereotypes, or promoting toxic masculinity.
What emerged from this participatory research was a portrait neither pessimistic nor naïve. Alongside the harms, the youth documented evidence of a powerful, youth-led anti-stigma movement flourishing across platforms. They found mental health education, suicide awareness resources, self-care strategies, and content normalizing the complexity of living with mental illness. The book also reveals how Latino youth leverage social media to discuss the social issues intertwined with their lives and identities: racism, immigration, school shootings, LGBTQIA+ support, and sexual assault.
Perhaps most importantly, the youth developed what one 16-year-old participant called "mindfulness behind the screen." She explained: "Social media is both good and bad, because you could be randomly using it and a bad video pops up, and then it makes your mental health worse. However, you could also use social media to look for better videos and be actively making changes to your algorithm and making sure that it's better for your mental health." This isn't passive consumption—it's active curation, boundary-setting, and digital resilience.
The research culminated with youth co-creating their own videos about their findings, designed to resonate with peers and parents. Duont-Reyes sees this work as a model for how institutions can genuinely listen to young people. "Too often, youth voices are misunderstood or ignored altogether," she notes. By centering Latino youth as knowledge-makers rather than subjects of study, "SocialsVoice" demonstrates how participatory research becomes a community-generated response to one of the defining anxieties of our time.