By Trevor Lakey, on behalf of the Aye Mind collaborative

How time flies! Around a decade ago, we took our first giant leap for youth mental health, and started out on a bold journey to explore digital approaches to youth mental health.

Today, our Aye Mind relaunch gives us the opportunity to look back at where we have come from so that we can take a strong step forward. In this piece, we’ll chart the course we have taken with Aye Mind so far and highlight some of the learnings we’ve gained along the way.

Phase 1. Our moonshot project

Back in 2012, the NHSGGC Mental Health Improvement Team was involved in the collaborative development of a Child and Youth Mental Health Improvement Framework. This set out six interlocking areas for partners to progress improvement activity – which became known as our “six-box model”.

One of those – exploring social media and peer support became a long-standing priority for our team and partners. Back then, we saw this as our moonshot project; a giant leap we needed to take to best promote positive mental health and wellbeing among our children and young people. With this, the momentum that would launch Aye Mind into being began.

Phase 2. Exploring the territory – Project 99

From there, we embarked on the first exploratory step of our journey, which came to be known as Project 99. We wanted to understand the seemingly vast, and somewhat unknown, digital youth mental health territory.

This saw us bringing together the collective talents of Young Scot, The Mental Health Foundation, and design agency Snook. Alongside these partners, we focused our efforts on engaging with, listening to, and co-creating with young people and those who work with them. We looked to understand how we could maximise the use of digital tools and approaches in promoting youth mental wellbeing. This led to a range of outputs, including:

• A series of anonymised in-depth analyses of young people’s online experiences in relation to mental health and wellbeing – positive and negative.
• A series of recommended development ideas from young people themselves about how we could better use digital assets to help young people strengthen their peer support contributions.

You can read all of the outputs on our Project 99 page.

Phase 3. Aye Mind launches

From this work, it became clear that the need for professionals to engage in the digital mental health space was not going to go away. In fact, as time passed, the need only seemed to grow. And so, our development work drove us on.

This led to a successful bid to the European Union’s digital social innovation fund (known as CHEST), for an award of 150,000 Euros. And with it, the Aye Mind that we know today was launched.

We brought together the same group of collaborators to help us navigate our way –
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Snook, Mental Health Foundation and Young Scot. Most importantly, we actively engaged with a range of GGC-based youth initiatives, ensuring that the perspectives of young people continued to be at the heart of Aye Mind.

This phase led to a range of outputs, insights, and further development areas for this important territory, including:

1. The production of a toolkit for youth-related workers on enhancing the use of digital approaches for youth mental health.
2. A resource-directory highlighting examples of digital mental health assets, resources, and services available (both local and international).
3. A drawing together of examples of coproduced youth content.
4. A manifesto for action on digital youth mental health, devised by young people.

What did we learn along the way?

Over the last decade of exploring the digital youth mental health territory, we have built up a broad base of learning. Our three key learnings to share with you are as follows:

• The “digital world” in relation to young people’s mental health is neither a panacea nor an entirely toxic landscape that should be avoided at all costs. Yes, we must address and minimise the many risks of digital engagement. We must, however, maximise the many positive opportunities that are afforded too. This includes developing the necessary skills and knowledge to safely utilise digital tools and technologies.
• Young people should be at the heart of any forward developments – both listening and learning from their experiences, but also engaging in co-design for any new assets and resources.
• Professionals and agencies need a more concerted support and development effort in order to effectively engage with digital mental health issues and resources. This is particularly given the complexity of the landscape, and the rapid pace of change. To do this well, we need a long-term investment approach and structures that can connect and share learning across multiple sectors.

From our journey so far, one thing is clear: national and local agencies of all sizes must consider how they investigate and respond to the ever-changing digital mental health sphere. After all, the risks that are posed by digital technologies do not simply go away if we don’t engage with them.  And our experience is that young people need considerable assistance in finding and drawing on the many positive resources and approaches that the digital world can offer.

Our next giant leap

Aye Mind is relaunching and as we take our next giant leap, we will continue to build on its legacy and the collective learning that has come before it. To help us do this, we are developing an ever-growing community of partners interested in exploring this territory together.

We hope you will join us as we embark on our next big venture.