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Civic Science Fellow McKenna Parnes investigates how collective action can ease youth mental health struggles

When McKenna Parnes asked 12 teenagers to give her a tour of their social media feeds, only three had ever seen mental health content mixed with their climate information. This gap between the distress young people feel about climate change and the mental health resources that could help them cope is what drives her work. 

Parnes did a network analysis and found that while climate mental health accounts and pages existed and followed major climate influencers, those influencers weren’t responding in kind or interacting. The mental health advocates remained on the outskirts of the network, present but effectively invisible.

For her Civic Science Fellowship project through Seattle Children’s Research Institute, Parnes is working directly with Gen Z youth—ages 13 to 28—to co-create solutions to the gaps they’ve identified together. Her previous research had already shown that one key to handling climate-induced depression symptoms is getting together to take action. Now she’s helping young people put that knowledge into practice.

“What we want to create together is something to potentially shift the narrative around climate change communication that’s happening on social media platforms,” Parnes says. “And it can be adapted for offline networks that interface with youth around climate change.” The goal is a communication toolkit co-designed with young people, for use everywhere from Instagram feeds to pediatric clinics.

Existential threats

Parnes didn’t set out to study climate distress. As a clinical psychology Ph.D. student, she focused on youth mentoring relationships and social support as protective mechanisms for mental health. Then came the pandemic.

“In my fourth year of graduate school, COVID-19 happened and everything shut down,” Parnes says. “I was seeing patients virtually, sometimes going into the hospital, teaching students. We all transitioned online. Over the course of that time, climate change was coming up more and more.”

The youth she was treating were witnessing unprecedented events, such as wildfire smoke from Canada turning the skies over New York orange in June 2023. Young people were “online more, seeing this narrative that was often very doom-focused: The world is ending, we’re running out of time,” she says. “A lot of the young people I was talking to felt helpless and uncertain about their future choices, especially with COVID-19 intersecting with this other existential threat.”

That experience transformed her research focus. Now at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Research Institute, her research with colleagues has found that youth who engaged in collective climate action experienced fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. She has supported her findings in more than 25 papers on youth and climate distress, including a recent review paper on the topic. 

What makes Parnes’s fellowship project distinctly civic science is her approach to conducting the research. Rather than designing studies about youth, she designs them with youth.

During the virtual meetings where young people shared their screens and walked her through their social media feeds, she asked young climate activists nationwide to describe a few climate-related pages that they follow or that regularly pops up in their feeds and explain why those spoke to them. For those who had created their own climate-content, she asked how they decided what to include in the posts, who it was reaching, and what the goal was. “They’re all just so willing and open and wanting to participate,” Parnes says. 

After completing 12 individual social-media tours, Parnes brought the youths together to co-design workshops where young people could identify gaps and begin creating solutions. 

The young people participating in Parnes’s research aren’t just providing data. They’re reshaping the research. “Kids are questioning where they want to live. As young as high school, I’m hearing kids talk about whether they want to have kids in the future, because they don’t want to bring them into a burning world,” she says. They don’t feel they have a say in the future that’s being created for them, a future with greater risk of climate disasters.

But they also offered unexpected insights. “One of the amazing things the youth brought up in the co-design sessions is the need to make sure that the climate justice movement is not just reproducing capitalist tendencies and a focus on productivity,” Parnes says. “Once we get entrenched in that cycle, it’s hard to break out, and it’s not actually aligning with the values young people want to hold.”

Parnes now uses the term “climate distress” rather than “climate anxiety” because it better captures the range of emotions involved. Current messaging often emphasizes urgency and individual responsibility, trying to rouse people to act, but that focus is potentially harmful for wellbeing. “We see so much burnout in these activist movements,” she says. “We see so many young people feel a sense of responsibility to the point where it’s impacting their functioning.” 

The power of community

The Civic Science Fellowship connected Parnes with a cohort of civic science practitioners she was surprised to find common ground with. Unlike her previous postdoc, where fellows often worked in isolation despite similar goals, the Fellowship creates intentional interdisciplinary connections.

“There were people doing education in museums, and that’s not even a space I would have thought of,” she says. “This work can translate to so many different contexts. There’s so much overlap, even though our professional backgrounds are quite different.”

This exposure influenced how she thinks about the toolkit’s potential reach. Working with the Seattle nonprofit, Climate Action Families, which trains youth to lobby and write bills, Parnes sees applications everywhere from social media to pediatric clinics. “Healthcare workers want to talk about climate change with young people, but they worry about it in the same way that there were concerns about talking about suicide. What if we bring this up? Will we just cause more distress?” That’s exactly what the toolkit project aims to address, providing frameworks for discussing climate in ways that build resilience rather than despair. “

For others who want to get involved in civic science Parnes advises stepping away from your institutional identity. “The best work I do is not through my academic environment, but through relationships I’ve built with people in my community, as a citizen myself,” she says. “As soon as you come in with this formal title, tied to this institution, there’s a different conversation being had.”

She suggests volunteering first and building relationships without research agendas. “Then if it feels like I can be supportive to the work that’s happening, oftentimes that’s something that’s brought up through the shared conversations we have—not with an agenda of accomplishing research.”

Despite dealing regularly with heavy topics—climate catastrophe, youth mental health crisis, systemic failures—Parnes maintains hope through intentional community engagement. Recently she attended an intergenerational climate justice meeting about music in resistance movements, where someone who’d participated in protests in the 1960s and 70s lamented the lack of modern protest songs.

And then the kids spoke up. “We listened to some songs made by newer artists,” she says. “He was really inspired to hear those and hear the consistent messages. The young people loved hearing the older songs they could see had inspired what they hear today.”

The evening ended with making music together. “These were heavy topics, talking about the Vietnam War and racism and climate crisis, but there was so much joy in coming together,” Parnes says.

The co-design sessions should wrap up in spring 2026. Then Parnes and her young collaborators will see if their toolkit can do what those protest songs did—bring people together across difference, turning anxiety into action, isolation into community.