“Young people wanted something to grab them, and not something to make them think that this was a magic treatment program that was going to make everything better strait away. They wanted it to say momentum moving forward.” Have you ever wondered what your young child or adolescent client imagines their mental healthcare could look and feel like?
“Young people wanted something to grab them, and not something to make them think that this was a magic treatment program that was going to make everything better strait away. They wanted it to say momentum moving forward.”
Have you ever wondered what your young child or adolescent client imagines their mental healthcare could look and feel like? Perhaps the colours and imagery they might want to surround themselves with? The kinds of characters and situations they imagine learning new mental health skills through or how they want to chart and visually represent their journey?
Now an innovative new digital mental health platform for seven- to 17-year-olds developed by leading Australian mental health experts and co-designed with hundreds of young people, has brought to life that vision of personalised digital care for young people.
Momentum is a mental health digital hub that can help children and adolescents learn new ways to manage depression, anxiety and unhappiness. It can also help with some of the more common difficulties that come along with anxiety and unhappiness, such as sleep problems, unhealthy eating and lack of exercise.
It’s been described as Australia’s most comprehensive digital platform for child and adolescent mental health and integrates powerful detection and assessment tools to deliver tailored interventions.
Led by Professor Sonja March, director of the University of Southern Queensland’s Centre for Health and Research, where she is also a Professor in the School of Psychology and Wellbeing, the platform has been developed by a team of researchers, mental health experts, and web designers from across the country, and supported by the federal government under the Medical Research Future Fund.
The hub extends from Professor March’s work with Griffith University researchers – professors Caroline Donovan and Sue Spence with the popular BRAVE Self-Help program – which has reached more than 80,000 young people with anxiety.
For Professor March, digital mental health offers new opportunities for personalised care. For many young people, autonomy and personalisation are important factors when it comes to seeking help and engaging with digital mental health, she explains.
“We’ve been researching BRAVE now for 20 years, where we’ve been looking specifically at anxiety, and looking at how that online program works for young people and their families but we’ve also been doing a lot of qualitative work with our young people, parents and clinicians and asking, what could we do differently? What is it that’s missing? What are you looking for? And we kept getting the same messages from both young people and their parents as well as clinicians, to an extent, where they were telling us that they really enjoyed working on their own. They loved the autonomy that they have working through the program and they loved the skills that they were learning but that they wanted it to be just a little bit more personalised.”
While for some people that meant having therapist support, for a large portion of young people and parents, explanans Professor March, it was that they wanted the program to tailor more to the young person’s needs.
“We know that anxiety doesn’t just exist on its own. It does sometimes, but oftentimes it’s accompanied by depression or other related difficulties – sleep problems substance use in our teenagers, issues with other healthy lifestyle behaviours, for instance.
And we thought, well, we know how helpful BRAVE can be, but let’s try and figure out a way that we can make online programs a little bit more personalised by tailoring the content to the symptoms that the young person is experiencing and there’s not really been a lot of work done in that space in the digital field. We wanted to develop Momentum where we could really look at conducting an assessment of a client’s problems and then build a program just for a young person based on their symptoms”.
Children and teens using the platform will have a personalised 7-12 week CBT-based program mapped out for them based on a health assessment completed either independently for teens aged 15-17 or with parents or guardians for children younger. Young people using the program will also build up skills and their education around mental health through modules and exercises like exposure therapy, for instance, and visual mood trackers, weekly planners and reminders will help young people keep on top of their progress throughout their journey through the program.
In this episode of Digital Mental Health Musings, we unpack the evidence behind the program including the assessment tool that underpins the personalised journey for each individual user of the program. We delve into Momentum’s key features and how they work for children and teens, and we also talk about the different ways that health professionals can use the platform with their young clients to get the most out of this exciting new service.
“It’s exciting,” says Professor March of the program design. “Because the format and the platform really unlocks these new abilities of how we design something that just wasn’t available to us ten or 20 years ago. Young people are much more savvy these days – not only about technology, but about their mental health and what they need to do to manage their mental health and so it’s important that we adjust with that because they certainly were able to communicate to us that they really enjoyed that independence,” she added.
Who is Professor Sonja March?
Professor Sonja March is the Director of the University of Southern Queensland’s Centre for Health Research and a Founding Chief Investigator of the Manna Institute – Australia’s leading regional mental health Institute. Sonja is a Psychologist and has over 20 years’ experience developing innovative solutions to make mental health assessments and treatments more accessible to Australian families, especially those living in Regional, Rural and Remote Australia. Sonja was named Women in Technology’s Research Leader (Science) in 2020 for her work in child and adolescent mental health.
Check out some of the resources we discussed in this episode:
Momentum: https://www.momentumhub.org.au/
The Brave Program: https://brave4you.psy.uq.edu.au/
To request a free copy of the Momentum Guide for Health Professionals and/or to receive promotional material for your practice visit https://www.momentumhub.org.au/prereg_clinicians/#FAQ
Listen to the full conversation below. You can also access Digital Mental Health Musings on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Deezer.
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