Engaging Young People in Self Directed Mental Health Support

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Our mental health services are overwhelmed, with specialist services like Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) rejecting 1 in 5 referrals and pushing waiting times to sometimes over a year. Over 1.5 million children and young people in the UK are forced to wait so long for treatment that their condition gets worse or are unable to access any treatment at all.Working in partnership with the NHS, we have developed UB-OK, a digital platform for making mental health expertise and support accessible and engaging. UB-OK features a friendly conversational agent that talks to young people about their thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, providing them with CBT-informed activities and explanations developed by leading clinicians. Uniquely, our technology is designed to be accessible for clinicians to use it themselves, easily bringing their own expertise to potentially hundreds of thousands of patients.We provide immediate support for young people waiting for, or unable to, access mental health support and helping them to self-manage their mental health issues. This approach is both cost-effective and scalable, extending the reach of mental health practitioners at a relatively low cost, with expertise available to many patients at the same time.Maintaining user engagement is critical to the success of digital health interventions. In this project we will apply and test a range of techniques from the fields of human-AI interaction, gamification, and social computing, all currently underused in mental health settings, to find out which ones are effective and how to apply them within the sensitive context of mental health therapy.