There is a significant gap in support and treatment for young people’s mental health difficulties.
Many of the teams have developed and adapted interventions to address this crucial challenge, providing robust evidence of effectiveness along with indicators of mechanisms of change and ways of overcoming the challenges of implementation.
- Digital Youth have found that the interactive companion Purrble helps LGBTQ+ youth regulate their emotions and reduce depression and anxiety.
- Using fresh recruitment approaches, Digital Youth were able to engage with 126 young people to trial the online serious game SPARX providing CBT with e-coach support to those with low mood or depression, suggesting the intervention is feasible and acceptable.
- Young people and clinicians are enthusiastic about the co-created CaTS-App’s ability to empower collaborative self-harm assessment. This digital card-sorting exercise helps young people tell the story of their self-harm journey by mapping the thoughts, feelings and events involved in a self-harm episode.
- The ATTUNE team have used their findings on the interplay between adverse childhood experiences and mental health to inform the development of ACE of Hearts, a serious mobile game to support experiences around bereavement, poverty, disability, gender dysphoria and being a young carer. Initial findings show that this may be an effective tool to encourage self-reflection, reduce stigma and support emotional literacy.
- The EDIFY team’s RaISE trial is testing a brain-directed neuromodulation treatment for persistent anorexia nervosa, which it is hoped will increase treatment options for young people with persistent anorexia nervosa.
- The Nurture-U team will also soon publish findings that their mental health literacy course is beneficial: 594 students receiving the course reported increases in mental health knowledge, stress management and decreases in stigma and loneliness, and better wellbeing and less depression relative to a non-matched control group. The self-management and coping skills component of the course reduced anxiety, stress and depression in a factorial study.
- They will also shortly publish findings of their trial of internet CBT for students, finding that both guided and unguided versions reduced anxiety and depression symptoms without differences between them, although around 1/3 students did not engage with either intervention.
- The ReSET team have established the feasibility of their new school-based transdiagnostic group programme targeting social relationships and emotion processing, and will shortly publish results of their trial.
- The RE-STAR team are developing Place Positive: a school-based intervention to reduce the risk of depression among pupils with ADHD or autism traits.
Digital mental health interventions
As well as developing interventions, the teams have also furthered our understanding of digital interventions to support young people’s mental health.
- While the impact of personalisation on users’ engagement with and adherence to digital mental health interventions, there is a lack of clarity on how widely this is used, and its dimensions and mechanisms. The Digital Youth team scoped studies that explored these aspects in interventions for young people, extending a framework of personalisation approaches to incorporate non-therapeutic elements. They have used these findings to inform their work looking at ways that digital technologies could encourage and support a young person to use a self-help app more consistently and effectively, developing a companion agent app and addressing support for participants in research studies of digital interventions.
- To inform development of their serious game, the ATTUNE team reviewed the use of grief metaphors in serious games and explored how serious games for mental wellbeing balance rule-based play with creativity.
- The team have also reviewed the cost-effectiveness of digital health interventions for mental health in young people, finding some evidence to suggest digital health interventions hold the potential to expand and extend mental health support for the younger generations with minimal therapist involvement.