Title: Improving mental health literacy among children and young people aged 12-14 in the United Kingdom.
Funder: Department of Health and Social Care

Abstract: Mental health problems are estimated to affect 10-20% of children and adolescents worldwide. Research shows that the prevalence of depression rises sharply after puberty and that over half of depressed adolescents have a recurrent episode within five years. Mental health literacy can be defined as knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which help people to prevent, recognise and manage problems. We know that low levels of mental health literacy significantly increase the risk of adolescents developing moderate to severe depression and that improving mental health literacy may be a useful way to reduce the future burden of depression amongst young people. We propose co-adapting and extending an existing interactive tool, originally developed in Indonesia with MRC funding (IMPeTUs MR/R012741/1), to improve mental health literacy and self-management skills, for use in the UK with young people aged 12-14. The IMPeTUs intervention includes an immersive story line digital game in which young people play as two characters facing mental health challenges. Their decisions affect the direction of the game and eventual outcomes. This application will allow for UK specific intervention content to be developed and for associated materials to be co-produced with young people, parents, professionals and other stakeholders. This will include an additional intervention chapter identified as necessary through consultation with stakeholders in the development of this application, a training toolkit for facilitators, educational information for parents and an evidence-based implementation strategy to optimise use in the UK for young people. Initial support for our intervention comes from Patient and Public Involvement in the co-design and initial testing of our intervention (n=8) and evidence from 9 ongoing evaluations (n=90 young people) which suggests our intervention is accessible, acceptable, and implementable to young people. Once we have co-adapted our intervention, we will test whether it is feasible to deliver and evaluate our intervention in education and community settings in the UK. We will randomly allocate 30 young people to receive our intervention and 30 to not receive it and then follow them up 3-months later. We will explore how many young people want to take part in our study (recruitment and retention), how much they use our intervention and what sort of follow-up data they are willing to provide. We will speak to facilitators (n=6), young people (n=15) and professionals (n=15) about their experiences of receiving and delivering our intervention. We will use these findings to collaboratively design a larger study to explore the costs and impacts of our intervention. We will appoint a PPI advisory panel to oversee our project and recruit a researcher with experience of mental health problems. We will use different ways (leaflets, social-media, journal articles, animations/podcasts) to tell young people, families, professionals and communities about our work.

Lay abstract: Mental health problems are estimated to affect 10-20% of children and adolescents worldwide. Research shows that the prevalence of depression rises sharply after puberty and that over half of depressed adolescents have a recurrent episode within five years. Mental health literacy can be defined as knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which help people to prevent, recognise and manage problems. We know that low levels of mental health literacy significantly increase the risk of adolescents developing moderate to severe depression and that improving mental health literacy may be a useful way to reduce the future burden of depression amongst young people. We propose co-adapting and extending an existing interactive tool, originally developed in Indonesia with MRC funding (IMPeTUs MR/R012741/1), to improve mental health literacy and self-management skills, for use in the UK with young people aged 12-14. The IMPeTUs intervention includes an immersive story line digital game in which young people play as two characters facing mental health challenges. Their decisions affect the direction of the game and eventual outcomes. This application will allow for UK specific intervention content to be developed and for associated materials to be co-produced with young people, parents, professionals and other stakeholders. This will include an additional intervention chapter identified as necessary through consultation with stakeholders in the development of this application, a training toolkit for facilitators, educational information for parents and an evidence-based implementation strategy to optimise use in the UK for young people. Initial support for our intervention comes from Patient and Public Involvement in the co-design and initial testing of our intervention (n=8) and evidence from 9 ongoing evaluations (n=90 young people) which suggests our intervention is accessible, acceptable, and implementable to young people. Once we have co-adapted our intervention, we will test whether it is feasible to deliver and evaluate our intervention in education and community settings in the UK. We will randomly allocate 30 young people to receive our intervention and 30 to not receive it and then follow them up 3-months later. We will explore how many young people want to take part in our study (recruitment and retention), how much they use our intervention and what sort of follow-up data they are willing to provide. We will speak to facilitators (n=6), young people (n=15) and professionals (n=15) about their experiences of receiving and delivering our intervention. We will use these findings to collaboratively design a larger study to explore the costs and impacts of our intervention. We will appoint a PPI advisory panel to oversee our project and recruit a researcher with experience of mental health problems. We will use different ways (leaflets, social-media, journal articles, animations/podcasts) to tell young people, families, professionals and communities about our work.

Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH