We will work with young people to use digital technology to transform adolescent mental health and provide a safe, and supportive, digital environment to tackle the unmet need arising from mental health disorders in those aged 10-24 years old. We are facing a youth mental health crisis; in the UK, one in eight young people have a mental health disorder, and one in four young women aged 17-19 have significant depression or anxiety with half of those having self-harmed; non-suicidal self-harm has nearly tripled over the past 10 years, while suicide rates per 100,000 adolescents have almost doubled. However, less than a third of all young people with mental health disorders receive any treatment. Many mental health and wellbeing apps exist, but most have no evidence base and some could even be harmful. Meanwhile, few research-based digital interventions have been shown to have impact in the real world. The youth mental health crisis has coincided with huge changes in society with creation of the 'digital environment' where being online and using social media has become central to young people's lives. While social media can be a helpful place for accessing information, exchanging views and receiving support, it has also been linked with depression, suicide and self-harm. Yet not all young people are at risk of mental health problems with social media we don't yet understand why some young people are more vulnerable than others. The COVID-19 crisis has been associated with increased mental health problems and greater online activity in young people. While their need to access trusted support online is greater than ever, social media platforms are not designed to meet mental health needs of young people. Aims & objectives. We will work with young people in our Young Person Advisory Group to: 1. increase understanding of the relationship between digital risk, resilience and adolescent mental health. 2. develop and evaluate preventative and personalised digital interventions. We aim to: - identify risk and resilience factors related to troublesome online experiences and activities, to prevent or reduce the emergence of depression, anxiety, and self-harm in young people. - understand how individual differences affect digital engagement (e.g. with social media and games) and adolescent brain and psychosocial development. - build, adapt and pilot new a generation of personalised and adaptive digital interventions incorporating a mechanistic understanding of human support with a new digital platform for delivery and trials in adolescent mental health conditions. - develop and test a novel socially assistive robot to help regulate difficult emotions with a focus on adolescents who self-harm. - develop and test a new digital tool to help adolescents better manage impulsive and risky behaviour with a focus on reducing the risk of self-harm. Applications & benefits. This work will translate new knowledge into practical tools to support young people negotiate the digital world, develop resilience and protect their mental health. Our involvement of young people means that the outputs from the research will be suitable and meaningful. Young people will be actively involved shaping the research at all stages. Young people, their caregivers, teachers, clinicians and charities will benefit from a range of co-created apps and tools to manage youth mental health issues. Young people will benefit from research training offered as part of their involvement. Policy makers and academics will benefit from new understandings of risk and resilience in the digital world to support novel interventions and evidence-based policy. Our work will establish a new, ethical and responsible way of designing digital platforms and tools that supports young people's mental health. Our Mental Health & Digital Technology Policy Liaison Group and Partners Board will translate our research into a step-change in mental health outcomes.

Many aspects of a child or young person's life can affect their mental health. If someone has a serious mental health problem their general practitioner (GP) may refer them to mental health (psychiatry) services for assessment and treatment by professionals. Mental health services are stretched so often intervene late, leaving people to suffer unnecessarily with problems that therefore may last longer, be more severe, or be harder to treat. Early warning signs of mental health problems may be noticed by the person themselves or by others (e.g. school staff, social workers). Many things can suggest a mental health problem, such as difficult early experiences, bullying, changes in behaviour, poor school attendance or grades, or risk-taking. Not all who experience one or more of these will have a mental health problem, so we need to take them together to spot patterns that show who is developing problems and may need professional help. However, this information (data) is stored in different places, e.g. by schools, GPs and social workers and so it may be impossible to spot problems early. Some researchers have joined data from two or more sources to find patterns suggesting mental health problems. Their success indicates good potential in this approach, but they have not made a practical difference for two main reasons: 1) the models are not yet accurate enough, probably because they omit many factors that can lead to problems; 2) the results cannot be used directly to help young people as they are based on anonymous data. We will develop a system that can be used by health, education, or social workers to identify adolescents showing early signs of mental health problems, to offer them help sooner. At the same time we want to provide better anonymous data for research into predicting mental health problems. Data must be held securely (most likely in the NHS), and only people involved in a person's care should be able to see it, but we need to understand how best to do this. To use data for research while protecting privacy it will be anonymised, removing anything that directly identifies a person (e.g. name, address, date of birth, NHS number) and access will be restricted to approved researchers. But we do not yet know what technical problems there may be in linking the databases, or what data the system will need in order to detect people showing early signs of a problem. The final challenge is how to make this work within the NHS, schools, and social care settings to enable earlier identification of young sufferers of mental health problems. Over the next year, we want to tackle these challenges by creating a group including mental health researchers, psychologists, schools, the NHS, councils, computer scientists, security experts, mathematicians, people who provide services, and policy makers, many of whom are doing ground-breaking work in other areas. We want to turn their attention to jointly solving these problems. We must involve young people, their carers, and people with lived experience: it is their data and we need to understand their views. We would like their help thinking about which professionals can see their data, and what should happen when a young person is thought to be developing mental health problems. We will hold workshops about these questions. We also have permission to create an initial data set with data from health, social services, and education. We will anonymise these, and practise linking and analysing them. These will help us understand the challenges, so that our final plan will be more detailed and likely to succeed. In the future we want to test if a computer program makes it easier to identify mental health problems and offer young people treatments earlier, and if they get better quicker because of this. This might have a range of benefits including helping with school, relationships, home life, and getting jobs or into university, and we want to test this theory.