Rural Youth Face 74% Higher Suicide Risk. New Program Offers Free Online Support
The Rural Youth Mental Wellness Program offers free, confidential mental health tools designed specifically for rural young people.
By Lisa Foust Prater | Published on October 30, 2026
Rural youth age 15–19 are nearly 74% more likely to die by suicide than their urban counterparts (15.8 vs. 9.1 per 100,000 people), according a Rural Health Information Hub analysis of recent Centers for Disease Control data.
Jeff Winton, a dairy farmer from upstate New York, said that statistic hits close to home. He founded Rural Minds, a nonprofit that provides mental health resources and information, after his nephew died by suicide. “This situation is tragic, it’s heartbreaking, and it has to be addressed,” he told Successful Farming®.
To that end, Rural Minds partnered with Northwestern University’s Lab for Scalable Mental Health to create the Rural Youth Mental Wellness Program, which launched last month.
Winton said the program was designed specifically for rural teens and young adults, and was fine-tuned after a year of testing by a cross-section of adults and student FFA, 4-H, and Grange members.
“Before we rolled this out, we wanted to ensure that it was something that was going to be helpful and that it would resonate with the intended audiences,” Winton said.
Guides for Youth
The program’s website features downloadable guides on topics including anxiety and stress, depression, domestic and sexual violence, eating disorders, LGBTQ+ youth, loneliness and isolation, peer pressure, substance use, online bullying, suicide prevention, and finding support in rural communities.
The suicide prevention guide, for example, opens with crisis line numbers to call or text and explains what happens when someone reaches out to them. It lists signs that someone may be considering suicide and offers tips on talking to those who may be struggling and examples of other ways to demonstrate care. Additional crisis resources are linked.
Each topic includes the message: You are not alone. Another guide states, “Depression isn’t about being ‘weak’ or not trying hard enough. It’s a medical condition that changes how you feel, think, and act. Living in a rural area can sometimes make it harder to talk about or get help, but you don’t have to go through it alone.... It’s not just sadness, and it’s not your fault.”
A toolkit for adults includes resources, conversation starters, and other tools for supporting rural youth.
Virtual Skill-Building
The website also links to Project YES (Youth Empowerment and Support) from Rural Minds and Northwestern. The free virtual program consists of several online, self-guided sessions. Since privacy is a key factor in getting people to access the materials, Winton said, “It’s confidential. We don’t even ask for the person’s name.”
Topics include: improve your mood, rethink body image, handle self-harm urges, and stay safe during dark thoughts. If participants express risky feelings or behavior, they are immediately directed to accessible resources.
Jessica Schleider, founding director of Northwestern’s Lab for Scalable Mental Health, and her team created the sessions. “Project YES is a platform of evidence-based, self-guided, single-session interventions that take 5–10 minutes to complete,” Schleider said in a webinar introducing the program. “After any single-session intervention, whether it’s teaching the skill of self-compassion, cognitive restructuring, or helping people create a safety plan for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, you end with a concrete, step-by-step plan for exactly how to use the skill you just learned and what to do next.”
Treatment Gap
Schleider said mental health concerns among rural youth are exacerbated by a lack of resources, loneliness, and stigma. “Provider shortages are part of the problem, but that doesn’t explain the extreme gaps in care that we’re seeing,” she said. “Effective mental health supports just aren’t located where youth often first seek support, which is online, in primary care, and in schools.”
Even if local resources are available, she said, “Youth are often disempowered to access care on their own terms. In many states, they are required to get active parental consent to get any kind of mental health support, despite the fact a lot of youth are telling us in our research that the requirement to disclose distress to parents is a huge barrier to accessing support.”
Schleider said teens are often reluctant to share these needs with their parents. “Many times, their families are already going through a lot of stress and struggle, and they don’t want their mental health concerns to be another thing that their parents have to worry about,” she said. “There is a real need for youth-directed on-ramps to low-intensity, safe, and effective mental health tools that can be used right away.”
The program is intended to supplement professional counseling or medical intervention. “We are not suggesting this should replace any other forms of care that already exist, but we know the system that exists is not sufficient for rural youth,” Schleider said.
“It’s a way to help young people take the first step to say, ‘I haven’t been feeling right. Maybe I need to look into this.’ Or, ‘One of my friends seems to be really down. I want to help them, but I don’t know what to do.’ This is designed to be a starting place,” Winton said.
Breaking the Stigma
With just over a month since the program’s launch, Winton said, “Hundreds of young people have gone to our website and are now actively engaging with these modules and other materials. We will be doing more quantitative research as time goes on, but the qualitative anecdotal comments that are coming in from across the country and around the world are very positive.”
Winton said he is encouraged by the willingness of young people to openly discuss their mental health. “They are much more likely to talk about a lot of topics that older generations won’t talk about,” he said. “Rural youth are being disproportionately impacted by mental illness and suicide in particular, and we are hopeful this program can help fill the gap.”
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