What Youth Write About and Seek in an Anonymized Online Peer Support Forum: Insights from India.

Résumé

A high prevalence of psychological distress and unmet mental health needs among youth, combined with a preference for self-reliance and informal support (e.g., peers), poses a major public health challenge. Growing reliance on digital platforms highlights the potential of anonymized online peer support forums as accessible first-line avenues of support. In India, research on peer support interventions remains scarce. This study aimed to identify the concerns for which Indian youth engage in an anonymized, moderated online peer support forum, as well as the purposes for posting. A retrospective qualitative design was employed, analyzing all 137 posts of 124 unique users received between February 2024 and October 2025 on the forum using hybrid thematic analysis. Findings revealed that user posts encompassed diverse concerns across personal, relational, social, and achievement domains. Feeling states emerged as the most prominent theme, frequently co-occurring with other themes, followed by self-related concerns. Several posts explicitly mentioned mental health concerns such as depression and social anxiety, often without mention of professional help-seeking suggestions. Family-related issues, romantic relationship concerns, academic pressures, social comparisons, and unmet needs for approval were some of the other themes that emerged. Shifting from content to motivations for posting, the analysis identified purposes such as venting distress, seeking suggestions, sharing reflections, engaging in meaning-making, and seeking reassurance or validation. Future work needs to examine whether such forums can function not only as spaces for strengthening self-help and peer support processes but also as avenues for improving professional help-seeking through normalization and encouragement of the same when appropriate.