“With Friends, It’s Harder to Have a Serious Conversation”: Expectations of Youth when Disclosing Mental Health Concerns With Peers

Adolescence and emerging adulthood can be emotionally turbulent periods, in which individuals may experience anxiety, stress, or other mental illness. Individuals who fit into these developmental periods (hereby called “youth”) are characterized by a greater importance on peer relationships. More research is needed to unpack youths’ disclosure decisions when they disclose mental health (MH) information to their peers. Greene’s health disclosure decision-making model was used as a framework to understand the perspectives of youth about disclosing to peers, including their perceptions of peer disclosure, their assessments of peers, and their techniques to earn disclosure efficacy. Youth ( n = 33) participated in focus groups that unveiled four themes: youths’ assessment of receivers, peer MH literacy, MH as a joke, and youths’ disclosure behaviors. These findings have implications for Greene’s health disclosure decision-making model and may highlight other mechanisms that could be used in future models about youths’ MH disclosure.