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One of New York City’s more high-profile efforts to tackle the youth mental health crisis after the pandemic appears to be in limbo, and Health Department officials refuse to say whether they plan to renew a service that has drawn scrutiny.
Teenspace launched under former Mayor Eric Adams in November 2023 to provide local teens with free therapists by text, phone, or video chat. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene signed a three-year contract for $26 million with the platform.
Roughly 52,000 teens had signed up for Teenspace as of last week, Health Department officials told Chalkbeat. About 80% were students of color, they added. Teletherapy services such as Teenspace are hailed as an innovative way to help teens confront stress, anxiety, and depression in a way that feels comfortable for them: by texting. For some New York City teens, the platform was their first encounter with a therapist.
The Teenspace website says the program will run through November 2026.
The contract with Talkspace, the New York-based company that oversees Teenspace, was scheduled to end in September but was amended to add two years, according to the city contract portal.
Parent advocates have long raised concerns that health officials haven’t done enough to protect teens’ privacy on the Teenspace platform. They alleged that Teenspace collects user data and shares it with third parties for marketing purposes without their knowledge. The Health Department says that after advocates raised privacy concerns in 2024, it worked with Talkspace to create a privacy policy specific to Teenspace.
“They really should have been doing their due diligence,” said Shannon Edwards, a digital marketing consultant and founder of an online platform called AI for Families. “The work should have been done. It should have been understood.”
Neither the New York City Department nor Talkspace would answer questions about the contract. Rachel Vick, a Health Department spokesperson, said the agency “is in the process of an independent evaluation to review the demonstration project and its outcomes. NYC Teenspace will continue to serve clients while that process continues.”
Talkspace spokesperson Alana Morales referred questions to the Health Department.
One of the program’s biggest champions was then-New York City Department of Education Chancellor David Banks. In a recent interview with Chalkbeat, Banks said he wasn’t paying attention to the initiative. “I don’t know where it really went. I don’t know how impactful it is now.”
Though youth well-being has remained a major concern among mental health professionals since the pandemic, there are signs suggesting improvement. In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it had seen gains concerning youth mental health and suicide risk factors. Among such risk indicators: Persistent feelings of sadnessness or hopelessness had improved from 33% to 40% from 2023 to 2025.
Public records show advocates compelled Health Department officials to respond
After the contract was inked three years ago, privacy advocates sent Adams, Banks, and the health commissioner a letter expressing their “deep concerns” about Teenspace sharing users’ personal information with third parties.
Leonie Haimson, a critic of education technology who has long raised concerns over privacy issues, said it took advocates nearly a year of fighting to get the Health Department to improve the platform’s privacy policy. Public records she obtained and shared with Healthbeat showed that Health Department officials and Talkspace executives, including its CEO and a lawyer, were looking into the group’s inquiries about the use of trackers to monitor user data. Talkspace said it agreed to remove the trackers from the Teenspace website “as well as trackers not necessary for website operations or security,” records from December 2024 show.
In an email that same month to the Health Department, a Talkspace lawyer wrote that the company had taken measures “above and beyond what is normally required by even the more stringent public privacy standards.” He also noted the company hired an outside privacy law firm and “an outside pixel expert firm to independently and objectively scrutinize our privacy practices, policies and pixel usage, which was a material expense undertaken to help New York City DOH/DOE gain clarity on all of our practices.” In response, Talkspace revised its Teenspace privacy policy.
The advocates were irritated that the Health Department hadn’t taken a closer look at the Teenspace privacy protections before the contract was awarded.
“I just don’t think New York City is doing the job that it should be doing to really safeguard the privacy of children and teens in New York City,” Haimson said
Privacy concerns have continued to dog Teenspace.
At a City Council oversight hearing in April, Brooklyn council member Rita Joseph wanted to know if any of the Teenspace data collected were being “shared or sold” with third parties.
“The data is protected,” Marnie Davidoff, an assistant commissioner with the Health Department said. “The data that is used is only for service provision. There is no other allowable use of the data.”
Health Department officials did not provide more details on how the data is protected.
Chalkbeat Senior Reporter Alex Zimmerman contributed to this story.
Trenton Daniel is a reporter covering public health in New York for Healthbeat. Contact Trenton at tdaniel@healthbeat.org or on the messaging app Signal at trentondaniel.88.
