Young adults — roughly ages 18 to 29 — report some of the highest rates of anxiety and depression of any age group, and simultaneously some of the lowest rates of engagement with traditional mental health support programming, including peer support groups. This isn't a contradiction so much as a mismatch: much of what's on offer wasn't designed with this generation's actual comfort zones and communication habits in mind.
Why Traditional Support Formats Underperform With Young Adults
In-person support groups ask young adults to do something that runs against how much of their social and emotional life already happens: show up physically, at a scheduled time, in a room with strangers, and talk face to face about vulnerable topics with minimal warm-up. For a generation that's built much of its social connection through digital, often semi-anonymous or avatar-mediated spaces — gaming communities, Discord servers, multiplayer online worlds — that ask can feel like a bigger leap than program designers realize.
Video-call support groups solve some of this but introduce a different friction: young adults, who spend significant time in front of cameras for social media, are often acutely self-conscious about how they appear on screen, and video calls put appearance front and center in a way that can inhibit exactly the kind of open, unselfconscious sharing a support group needs.
Why Multi-User VR Fits This Population's Existing Comfort Zone
This is a population that, more than any other, already has fluency with avatar-based social interaction — many young adults have spent years socializing, forming friendships, and processing emotion inside multiplayer games and virtual worlds. A VR support group isn't introducing a foreign format to this generation; it's applying a clinical, facilitated structure to a mode of interaction they already trust and understand.
This matters beyond convenience. Comfort with the medium translates into lower activation energy to try the program in the first place, and potentially faster trust-building once inside a session, because the format itself doesn't feel like a barrier to get past before the real work of connecting can begin.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A college counseling center offers a VR peer support group for students managing anxiety or depression, positioned explicitly as an alternative to the traditional support group format that historically sees low student turnout.
A young adult mental health nonprofit runs VR support sessions themed around specific young-adult transition stressors — first jobs, relationship changes, family estrangement, financial stress — reaching a population that often doesn't self-identify as needing "therapy" but will engage with peer-framed support.
A healthcare system's young adult oncology or chronic illness program (echoing the AYA population discussed elsewhere in this series) uses VR as the default support format for this age group specifically, based on engagement data showing stronger uptake than in-person alternatives.
An Honest Caveat
Fluency with digital and avatar-based spaces doesn't mean every young adult wants their mental health support delivered that way — some will still prefer in-person or traditional talk-therapy formats, and offering VR shouldn't come at the expense of maintaining those options. The goal is expanding the menu to include a format this generation is statistically more likely to try, not replacing everything else with it.
The Takeaway
Young adults haven't disengaged from support programming because they don't need it — engagement data on anxiety and depression in this age group says otherwise. They've disengaged from formats that don't match how they already build and experience connection. A VR-based option meets this generation inside a mode of interaction they've already spent years getting comfortable with.
Foretell Reality is a multi-user virtual reality platform built for facilitated support group sessions, designed to meet young adults in a format that already fits how they connect. To explore a young adult mental health program, visit https://foretellreality.com/contact.