Young people in America are in the throes of a mental health crisis, and it’s not hard to understand why. To name just a few stressors, there’s the looming threat of climate disaster; the stress of applying to colleges; the mass shootings in school hallways; the social anxiety of scrolling through classmates’ feeds on Instagram; and the lack of access to adequate medical and psychological care, particularly in lower-income communities.

It can all be so much.

Recognizing this, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg rolled out a comprehensive mental health plan on Friday that addresses the specific concerns of young people. Teen Vogue caught up with Buttigieg, the youngest candidate in the race, as he headed to New Hampshire to talk about how he plans to provide mental health resources to the young people who need them.

Teen Vogue: So why did you choose to unveil the plan in New Hampshire — because of the opioid crisis there?

Pete Buttigieg: I think there is a lot of attention rightfully going to New Hampshire because of the opioid crisis there. New Hampshire is also a state with a very strong veterans community. Veterans are often disproportionately impacted by mental health concerns or a lack of mental health care. So it just felt like a natural place to have this conversation. But really we could be having this conversation just about any place in the country because just about every family is affected.

TV: I saw some of the quite bleak stats your team provided — one in five children have a diagnosable emotional or mental health disorder, and young Americans reportedly feel the loneliest of all other age groups. Why do you think there is this acute mental health crisis among young people in America right now?

Buttigieg: Well, there’s certainly a lot of structural things going on. We’re still figuring out as a species how to deal with technology and how it’s changing our lives — social media being the main example.

But I think a lot of this is not new; we’re just learning how to talk about it. There have been mental health challenges as long as there have been people; we just haven’t had a name for it or the willingness to deal with it or to treat it. And so part of what I’m trying to get across is that this isn’t just about the extreme cases. We should think about mental health the way we think about physical health.

There’s a range of things that can happen, from a broken knee to stage IV cancer, and the same thing is true with mental health. We shouldn’t let it get to the point where we’re using words like crisis before we’re attending to mental health needs. Especially for young people, where we can potentially identify things long before they turn into a condition that can be one of the dominating experiences of their lives.

TV: This is all obviously worse in low-income communities. In rural communities, people might physically lack access to care, or often parents may not have the resources or time to attend to their kids’ mental health problems. How would your plan address that?

Buttigieg: We need to take the right steps to deal with a provider shortage that is especially acute in more rural areas. Specifically, with regard to mental health, this is an area where there is a lot of potential in telemedicine and telepsychiatry. This does not mean that we’d walk away from in-person care, but we know that a lot of the need can be met, and met more promptly through telemedicine.