YouTube and Mental Health: Scoping Review with ☸️SAIMSARA.

Name: SAIMSARA Evidence Object mental::YOUTUBE_MENTAL_HEALTH_SS
Creator: SAIMSARA
License: https://saimsara.com/license/

SAIMSARA

doi:10.62487/saimsara3f549f63

YouTube and Mental Health: Scoping Review with ☸️SAIMSARA.

Issue 4, Volume 1, 2026

Editorial note

• Last update: 2026-05-16 22:15:21

What is this paper about

YouTube is not simply good or bad for mental health: it is a powerful bidirectional ecosystem where psychoeducation, peer support, and low-threshold interventions coexist with misinformation, stigma, harmful comments, self-diagnosis, sleep disruption, and distress-amplifying use. The full evidence map helps clinicians, researchers, and platform designers see which YouTube exposures are beneficial, which are risky, and where the strongest signals emerge across 249 original studies.

Human-verified editorial review Verified by World ID proof-of-human. This editorial layer was submitted from a SAIMSARA account verified as a unique human.

Evidence preview · Did you know?

Decorative image of a person searching mental-health information on YouTube while a clinician reviews digital information nearby.

YouTube is where people self-consult

Did you know? In one survey, 57% of respondents searched YouTube for mental-health information, but 65% were concerned about online accuracy.

This makes YouTube both a mental-health entry point and a misinformation risk.

Decorative image of a public mental-health campaign spreading through video platforms and mobile screens.

Mental-health campaigns can scale fast

Did you know? One digital mental-health campaign reached 1.39 million residents, 3.49 million impressions, and 630,000 views, while MTV Shuga “Alone Together” reached 7.7 million views.

This shows how YouTube can turn mental-health communication into population-scale outreach.

Decorative image of clinicians and platform safety staff reviewing harmful self-harm content on a video platform.

Self-harm exposure is the hard safety signal

Did you know? Among deliberate self-harm presenters, 91% had seen self-harm content, 30% reported severe emotional disturbance, and exposure above 5 hours/day increased risk of disturbance and emulation.

This is where YouTube becomes a clinical safety and governance issue.

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Abstract:

Keywords:

Review Stats

Final search date and database lock: 2026-05-14 21:22:36 CEST

Plan: Pro (expanded craft tokens; source: Semantic Scholar)

Source: Semantic Scholar

Total Abstracts/Papers: 1840

Downloaded Abstracts/Papers: 1000

Included original and non-original Abstracts/Papers (all): 290

Included original Abstracts/Papers (Vote counting by direction of effect): 249

Reference Index (links used in paper): 124

Total participants/sample observations (topic deduplicated ΣN): 3,339,038

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The full evidence review, including the Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, figures, and complete reference index, opens after purchase or sign-in. The Evidence Object JSON is a separate machine-readable evidence product: a concentrated synthesis of results, topic-level evidence, and discussion across original and non-original studies. It can be directly input into your LLM, agent, or RAG workflow.

Reference Index (124)

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