This story is part of the 2025 TIME100 Next . Read Aileen Lee’s tribute to April Koh here .

April Koh vividly remembers the first time she tried to talk to her mother about her mental health, when she was about nine years old.

“She was doing the laundry, and I kind of snuck up behind her and said to her, ‘I think I’m depressed,’ and she told me, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’”

Her mother’s response didn’t come from a lack of care but a lack of understanding. “My mother is incredibly loving and the best mother I could have hoped for, but she didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about what I was feeling and what I was going through,” Koh says.

In the following years, it became clear to Koh that the conversation about mental health was challenging for families across the country. Mental health

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