There's already one centre run by the "Headspace" organisation in Torrens Street in Braddon but another one is now planned for the south of the city to try to relieve the rising burden of stress and mental illness among ACT youth.

The existing Braddon facility is currently helping nearly a thousand people with their mental health every three months. It's one of the busiest units of its type in Australia, offering free or low-cost professional counselling for twelve- to 25-year-olds.

"We offer a range of supports for young people worried about their drug and alcohol use, mental, physical or sexual wellbeing," is its promise.

Such is the demand at the existing centre that the new one is to be created using new money allocated in Tuesday's federal budget.

Mental health experts say that the need for help is rising in the ACT.

It's partly because the city's population is rising but there are other factors beyond that. Canberra is a black-spot in Australia because of the high number of young people drawn by the universities.

On top of that, the stigma about mental illness is becoming less, according to Lauren Anthes, general manager at the territory's Capital Health Network, the government body which allocates funding.

She said less stigma meant more people were coming forward with problems.

Social media was doing two things: it was putting more pressure on young people but also making it easier to get the message out that mental illness could be discussed openly.

It's not clear exactly how social media increases the pressure but it's been mooted that young people, alone in front of a screen in the privacy of their room at home, can suddenly find themselves "unfriended" by lots of people in their school, and that can be traumatic. Previous generations might have suffered face-to-face taunting but not online trolling.

It has not been decided where the new southern Canberra centre is to be. Woden has been mentioned but Ms Anthes said that the demographics would be studied to work out where the need was greatest and where was most convenient for people with problems.

At the Headspace centre at Braddon on Wednesday, one mother who did not want to be identified said it had been an immense help to her teenage daughter who was there being counselled for deep anxiety. The girl could barely go out in public.

The mother said, "We're just an average family trying to negotiate the school system and the mental health system and it's been incredibly traumatic."

Counselling for the teenager cost little or nothing at the Headspace centre but the bill would be about $120 a session elsewhere, far more than the family could afford on a long-term basis.

"I'm very grateful for the service we've had here for the past two years," said the mother with her shy daughter in the background.

"It's been exhausting. I'm so grateful."

One Canberra organisation welcomed the cash boost but said that the deeper sources of some mental problems also needed to be tackled.

"The funding is great but we also need to see the underlying causes addressed," Dr Justin Barker, the director of the Youth Coalition of the ACT said.

"We need job opportunities, particularly for young people not going to university."

Not being able to afford housing was crucial, he believed. "The housing market and the labour market - this is the source of the lack of hope for the future." He also believed that young people lacked hope because too little was being done to help the environment.

Another help organisation helping - The Kids Helpline - said that young people in the ACT make just under 7000 calls a year looking for help. That's an average of about 20 a day.

The organisation which runs a 24-hour service for people from the age of five up to 25 said, "From 2015 to 2017, there was an overall increase of 27 per cent in attempted contacts from the ACT across all media (phone, web chat and email)."

It said that compared with the rest of Australia, calls for help from the ACT were less likely to be white or Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders and more likely to be from other ethnic backgrounds. They were also more likely to be in their late teens or early 20s.

Its figures show that in the last three years, there's been a fall in the proportion of young women calling and a rise in the male cry for help as well as calls from transgender people.

Headspace, Canberra is at 1 Torrens Street, Braddon - 5109 9700.