What does it mean to teach mental health literacy?
Pooja Mehta, project coordinator for the Mental Health Literacy Collaborative’s Young Adult Council, has one answer: “Teaching people how to be people. Teaching people how to connect with each other, how to care about each other, and really how to strengthen those bonds that give rise to functional and caring communities.”
Originally from North Carolina, Mehta helped lead the development of a mental health literacy advocacy toolkit designed by and for young people — one of the many tools the Mental Health Literacy Collaborative (MHLC) oversees.
Created in 2023, the MHLC is a nonprofit organization that connects state leaders across the country with knowledge, strategies, and advocacy tools to promote student and community well-being through mental health literacy education.
Built around four key pillars, mental health literacy (MHL) is an educational framework that aims to equip people with the knowledge they need to identify and advocate for their health needs. This approach offers an upstream solution to meeting youth mental health needs.
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The four pillars that guide the MHL framework are:
- Understanding how to foster and maintain positive mental health.
- Understanding common mental health disorders, signs and symptoms, and treatments.
- Understanding how to seek help effectively.
- Understanding stigma and strategies for stigma reduction.
MHL stems from health literacy, a concept that promotes public health by making sure that people can access, understand, and use health information to make informed decisions about their health.
“We have it in lots of areas,” said Annie Slease, one of the cofounders of the MHLC, of health literacy. “We don’t have it necessarily around our mental health.”
For example, Slease explained, students learn about how their heart, lungs, and muscles work, and how to take care of them, while they’re in school. However, Slease said, medical professionals don’t typically teach these general concepts to students — teachers do.
“That’s what we need around our minds,” she said. “Everyone deserves to understand their mental health.”
Filling this gap in knowledge is where the MHLC’s work comes in, as the collaborative was created explicitly to teach people about mental health literacy at a foundational level through education, policy guidance, and research.
Toolkits and trainings help empower leaders to promote youth well-being
One avenue for this education is the collaborative’s Young Adult Council. Made up of 15 young people from across the country, including Mehta, the council exists to amplify young adult voices within MHLC’s work.
The first of the Young Adult Council’s tools, the MHLC Young Adult Advocacy Toolkit, was entirely researched, written, and designed by young people. The document unpacks each of the four pillars within MHL and provides readers with actionable next steps.
Mental health literacy isn’t just about knowing the words—it’s about living them. By understanding and applying these four pillars in our daily lives, we become advocates not only for ourselves but for our friends, families, and entire communities. Together, we can create a world where caring for our minds is just as normal—and just as celebrated—as caring for our bodies.
— Young Adult Advocacy Toolkit
For example, highlighting the first and second pillars of MHL, the toolkit distinguishes that mental health is not the same as mental illness.
While mental health is a broad “state of wellbeing that enables individuals to learn, work, and contribute to their communities,” mental illness “refers to a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder and can range from mild to severe,” the document reads.
The toolkit’s introduction also discusses basic brain science, explaining to readers that changes to brain chemicals, such as not having enough of the chemical serotonin, can negatively affect a person’s mood.
These definitions reflect the types of knowledge that build MHL and, ultimately, empower a person to feel confident speaking about and advocating for their mental health needs.
Huda Ismail, one of the toolkit’s coauthors, told EdNC that during her time teaching K-12 students online during the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized that her students had a desire to connect and talk about how they were feeling, but often lacked the words or opportunities to express those feelings. Looking back, she said, she realizes that if students aren’t able to understand how to maintain their well-being, then they aren’t able to show up for themselves or their community.
“And so I think with this toolkit, it does really give young adults and children, especially, the tools and the language to understand what they’re feeling, and then also it gives them actionable items to move forward with that,” Ismail said.
Individual actions in the toolkit include helping students reflect on what advocacy means to them, identifying what kind of advocate they want to be and where it fits into their life, and mapping out their “partner-in-advocacy.”
At the community level, the toolkit explains how young people can safely and effectively share their mental health stories, organize awareness events, and create peer support networks. At the government level, the toolkit tells readers how to identify and communicate with their federal and state representatives.
You can read the toolkit in its entirety below.
The Young Adult Council is just one avenue through which the MHLC promotes the MHL framework.
Another key tool is the collaborative’s MHL training. According to Slease, a common barrier to implementing MHL in schools is that teachers don’t feel like they know enough about mental health to teach about it.
Designed in response to this need, the MHLC’s hour-long “MHL Aware” training offers a first step in providing teachers the confidence they need to teach and speak about mental health literacy. The MHLC has been able to offer the training asynchronously to pre-service teachers for free through a partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative.
“Educators need to know that they can do this,” Slease said regarding teaching mental health literacy. “This is not therapy, this is not clinical. This is literally teaching — which is your superpower, educators — but it’s only going to be effective when they have the knowledge themselves first.”
Read more about youth well-being in NC
Using the mental health literacy framework to assess state mental health policies
The MHLC also facilitates an interstate work group for state leaders in 48 states, including North Carolina, to share, collaborate, and uplift promising practices.
Most recently, the interstate work group helped create the MHL Evaluation Tool, which serves as a north star for mental health education standards. Slease said that work group leaders surfaced a need for a standard to evaluate mental health education programs against, as she said no universal mental health education standards currently exist.
Launched in January 2026, the open source tool guides users through steps to identify whether or not a health education program includes each of the competencies that fall under MHL’s four pillars.
In 2024, Slease coauthored a national scan that identified and examined student mental health education policies in K-12 schools across the country. According to the paper, researchers used the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) school mental health education map as a starting point for the analysis. Slease and her coauthors found that, while most states have some form of school mental health policy, the language and standards around each vary widely.
North Carolina’s own school mental health policy was introduced in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that shed light on the state’s youth mental health needs.
The policy, legislated in Senate Bill 476 and outlined by the State Board of Education in SHLT-003, requires each K-12 school to annually submit a school-based mental health plan. According to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) website, the plans must include a mental health training program and a suicide risk referral protocol.
From Slease’s point of view, North Carolina’s policy establishes important expectations and frameworks around how schools can promote student mental health. To bolster the policy, her advice is to take a “baby step backwards” to make sure everyone, from administrators to educators, has a foundational understanding of mental health literacy.
Additionally, Slease said that MHL and social emotional learning (SEL) are not the same, but complementary. While SEL focuses on understanding relationships, emotions, empathy, and responsible decision-making, MHL teaches more explicitly about definitions, stigma, and primary barriers within mental health care. Without learning about MHL, Slease said, it’s possible schools are missing key pieces of information that would equip them to make progress in promoting youth mental health.
At the same time, North Carolina’s school mental health policy is an example of the state’s effort to prioritize student mental health after the pandemic.
For example, a DPI webinar highlights how the state used the policy as a lever to promote access to high quality and well-coordinated mental health services for students at the six pilot districts participating in federally-funded Project AWARE. And, more recently, Heidi Austin, Project AWARE director at DPI, was recognized by the Institute for Healthcare Advancement for the program’s contributions to mental health literacy.
As North Carolina schools continue to work to support their students’ mental health, Mehta encourages mental health advocates not to underestimate the power of their individual efforts.
The annual “Raj Mehta Day of Good” held in April, for example, is one effort from Mehta’s own mental health advocacy that she hopes applies mental health literacy education to help systems work better for themselves and their communities. Held in honor of her late brother, Mehta told EdNC in an email that the idea behind the event is to remind participants how easy it is to spread kindness.
“It is something that everyone is capable of,” said Mehta of mental health advocacy. “It is something that we should be encouraging everyone to be a part of, and kind of reframing it as: Rather than this being an accolade to chase, this is a value that we want to instill.”
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