Opening a door to mental-health help online

Rob Morris, SM ’09, PhD ’15, didn’t know where to turn when he first felt symptoms of depression as a teenager: “I had no exposure to healthy coping strategies. I had no vocabulary for what was happening to me.” That experience, he says, has driven his work on Koko, a tech nonprofit that grew out of his PhD work at the MIT Media Lab and aims to “address youth mental health by reaching young people where they are.” And where they are is online—on TikTok, Snapchat, or Discord, or maybe chatting wi