PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Mental Health
This article is part of the Research TopicYouth Mental HealthView all 14 articles
Telepsychiatry, Access, and Equity: Accelerating Mental Health Care for Rural and Low-Income Youth
Provisionally accepted
- 1Augusta University Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, United States
- 2Brown University, Providence, United States
- 3Department of Psychiatry and Health Behavior, Augusta University Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, United States
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For rural youth, seeking mental health care often carries high stakes: in tight-knit communities where 'everyone knows everyone,' privacy is limited, and delays in mental health support can allow manageable symptoms to escalate into crises. Telepsychiatry provides confidential, flexible, and timely access, enabling youth to seek help early and receive support without delay. This perspective synthesizes current evidence on telepsychiatry's benefits and challenges and highlights opportunities for growth through hybrid care models, policy reforms pertaining to payment parity and credentialing by proxy for provider licensing, digital equity initiatives, and community-based approaches for building literacy and trust, ensuring that all youth including neurodivergent persons from rural, inner-city, and low-income communities can access effective, urgent, and private mental health care.
Keywords: Telepsychiatry, rural and underserved populations, Youth mental health, health equity, Community initiatives, Scalable, Inclusive, policy
Received: 04 Sep 2025; Accepted: 24 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sharma, Sharma and Peeples. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Mehek Sharma, mesharma.ms@gmail.com
Dale Peeples, dpeeples@augusta.edu
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