Engaging Young People in Self Directed Mental Health Support

我们的心理健康服务不堪重负，儿童和青少年心理健康服务（CAMHS）等专业服务拒绝了五分之一的转诊，并将等待时间推到有时超过一年。在英国，超过150万儿童和青少年被迫等待治疗，他们的病情恶化或根本无法获得任何治疗。我们与NHS合作开发了UB-OK，这是一个数字平台，用于提供心理健康专业知识和支持。UB-OK具有友好的对话代理，与年轻人谈论他们的想法，感受和行为，为他们提供由领先的临床医生开发的CBT知情活动和解释。独特的是，我们的技术旨在让临床医生自己使用，轻松地将他们自己的专业知识带给潜在的数十万患者。我们为等待或无法获得心理健康支持的年轻人提供即时支持，并帮助他们自我管理他们的心理健康问题。这种方法具有成本效益和可扩展性，以相对较低的成本扩大了心理健康从业人员的覆盖范围，同时为许多患者提供专业知识。保持用户参与度对于数字健康干预的成功至关重要。在这个项目中，我们将应用和测试一系列来自人类-人工智能交互，游戏化和社交计算领域的技术，这些技术目前在心理健康环境中未得到充分利用，以找出哪些是有效的，以及如何在心理健康治疗的敏感背景下应用它们。

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.