Pilot evaluation to assess the effectiveness of youth peer community support via the Kooth online mental wellbeing website.

BACKGROUND: Mental health problems among young people are of growing concern globally. UK adolescent mental health services are increasingly restricted to those with the most severe needs. Many young people turn to the internet for advice and support, but little is known about the effectiveness, and potential harms, of online support. Kooth is a widely-used, anonymised and moderated online platform offering access to professional and peer support. This pilot evaluation sought to assess changes in the wellbeing and mental health of Kooth users, and changes in their use of formal services, over one month. We explored how community aspects of the site were used, and we considered the economic implications for commissioners making Kooth available to young people. METHODS: We surveyed young people when they first accessed Kooth and again one month later (n = 302). Respondents completed measures of mental health and wellbeing, including family relationships and pandemic-related anxiety, and reported on their use of services and, at follow-up, their perceptions of whether and how they had benefitted. We carried out qualitative interviews with ten participants, exploring perceptions of the Kooth community and its impact. RESULTS: We found improvements across nearly all measures, including reductions in psychological distress, suicidal ideation and loneliness. Subsample analyses suggested similar benefits for those who used only the community/peer parts of Kooth as for those who engaged with Kooth's counsellors. Participants reported learning from peers' suggestions and experiences, described as different from the advice given by professionals. Helping others gave users a sense of purpose; participants learnt self-help strategies and became more confident in social interactions. Service use and opinion data suggested Kooth experiences may help users make more appropriate and effective use of formal services. CONCLUSION: This pilot evaluation suggests that Kooth is likely to be a cost-effective way of providing preventative support to young people with concerns about their mental health, with possible benefits across a range of domains which could be investigated in a future controlled trial.

Assessing the need of young people using online counselling services: how useful are standardised measures?

BACKGROUND: Clinical assessments for children and young people entering a mental health service help to identify the prevalence of need within that population, support intervention recommendations, and enable service evaluation. Evidence related to the use of standardised measures in an ever-expanding online environment, for the purpose of identifying need, is limited. METHODS: This study explores the reliability of using a standardised measure to detect clinical need in an online therapeutic environment, and the measures assessed are as follows: Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), Young Person's CORE (YP-CORE) and the Short Warwick and Edinburgh Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS). A deep-dive approach is used to inform practitioner assessment of young people, followed by a Weighted Cohen's Kappa (Κw) to measure the interrater reliability between this and the individuals' self-rated outcome. Composite case studies represent the complexities of presentation among the sample population. RESULTS: The interrater reliability between self-rated and practitioner rated assessment varied between Κw = .222 and Κw = 0.446 depending on the measure. High levels of need and low levels of well-being were found among the sample (YP-CORE Avg. = 26.9, SDQ Avg. = 19.56, SWEMWBS Avg. = 18.1). CONCLUSIONS: The findings demonstrate a fair to moderate reliability when assessing concordance between service users and practitioners, which suggests standardised measures are a reliable indicator of need. Higher levels of need were present than those seen previously in general or face-to-face clinical populations, which suggests using such measures in an online therapeutic environment influences the way in which assessments are responded to.

Digital mental health outcome monitoring for a structured text-based youth counselling intervention: Demographic profile and outcome change.

BACKGROUND: Digital mental health interventions comprise a potentially effective and accessible form of support for young people, particularly at times when traditional face-to-face service delivery is reduced, as in the COVID-19 pandemic. AIMS: This study assessed the demographic profile of young people using a digital mental health support service and evaluated outcome change over the course of a structured online counselling intervention (synchronous text-chat sessions with a practitioner). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The data were collected from 23,260 young people aged between 10 and 25 years engaging with the intervention between April 2019 and June 2021. RESULTS: Young people accessing these services had high levels of mental health needs, particularly those identifying with non-binary gender identity. Service users were mostly female, with equitable rates of access for young people from racialised communities. Overall outcome change demonstrated small effect sizes according to the YP-CORE (0.19) and CORE-10 (0.38), which increased to a moderate level when young people remained engaged with a dedicated practitioner for at least seven sessions (0.38, 0.58). Regression analysis illustrated the effect of the number of sessions on outcome change, but this can be also influenced by other variables such as age and gender. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Further research is required to explore ways to engage with young people using digital web-based services for a longer period and to collect and analyse single-session outcome data.

Alienated and unsafe: Experiences of the first national UK COVID-19 lockdown for vulnerable young people (aged 11-24 years) as revealed in Web-based therapeutic sessions with mental health professionals.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have disproportionately affected young people, and those who are vulnerable are disadvantaged further. Here, we seek to understand the experiences of vulnerable young people accessing Web-based therapeutic support during the pandemic and early lockdown, as revealed through the observations of mental health professionals. Methods: Four focus groups with 12 professionals from a digital mental health service were conducted to understand the experiences of vulnerable young people during the pandemic lockdown. Workshops with young people with diverse experiences resulted in the co-design of the focus group topic guide and the interpretation and validation of analysis. The experiential inductive-deductive framework of thematic analysis was used to analyse the workshop transcripts. Results: Four main themes and subsequent subthemes were identified: escalation of risk; the experience and consequence of loss; feeling supported and empowered; and feeling separate and isolated. Conclusions: Findings reflect early data that suggest that those with existing vulnerability face an increased risk of poor outcomes through the pandemic and the restrictions of lockdown, but evidence is also provided of positive outcomes from lockdown and its function as a catalyst for change. Results reinforce the need for focused support for vulnerable young people as we emerge from lockdown, and point to supportive and protective factors of relevance to online and offline support provision.

The Helpfulness of Web-Based Mental Health and Well-being Forums for Providing Peer Support for Young People: Cross-sectional Exploration.

BACKGROUND: Young people are increasingly seeking out web-based support for their mental health and well-being. Peer support forums are popular with this age group, with young individuals valuing the fact that the forums are available 24/7, providing a safe and anonymous space for exploration. Currently, little systematic evaluation of the helpfulness of such forums in providing support has been conducted. OBJECTIVE: This study examined the helpfulness of the support offered within web-based mental health and well-being peer support forums for young people. It specifically investigated the self-reported user ratings of helpfulness reported through the completion of a developing experience measure. The ratings will be used to consider further development of the measure and reflect upon the overall helpfulness of the forums as indicated by the reported scores. METHODS: The study used routinely collected practice-based outcome data from web-based mental health forums for young people. These forums are hosted by the UK-based web-based therapy and support service, Kooth. A cross-sectional design was used to explore-using a range of inferential statistical measures-the outcomes reported by those accessing the forums using a Peer Online Community Experience Measure (POCEM). To consider the helpfulness in general, 23,443 POCEMs completed in 2020 were used. A second data set of 17,137 completed POCEMs from the same year was used to consider whether various engagement indicators had an impact upon the helpfulness rating. RESULTS: Female users aged between 11 and 16 years predominantly completed the POCEM. This is in keeping with the majority of those using the service. In total, 74.6% (8240/11,045) of the scores on the POCEM indicated that the individuals found the posts helpful. An ANOVA indicated that male users were more likely to report obtaining intrapersonal support, whereas female users obtained interpersonal support. Furthermore, the POCEM scores reflected the internal consistency of the measure and provided an insight into the way that young people made use of the peer support resource; for instance, posts that were rated more helpful were correlated with spending longer time reading them, and the topics discussed varied throughout the day with more mental health issues being discussed later at night. CONCLUSIONS: The results seem to demonstrate that, overall, the young people involved in this study found web-based peer support helpful. They indicate that peer support can provide an important strand of care within a supportive mental health ecosystem, particularly during time periods when in-person support is typically closed. However, limitations were noted, suggesting that caution is needed when interpreting the results of this study. Although such services are incredibly well used, they have received little research attention to date. As such, further investigation into what constitutes helpful and unhelpful peer support is needed.

The design and development of an experience measure for a peer community moderated forum in a digital mental health service.

Online digital mental health communities can contribute to users' mental health positively and negatively. Yet the measurement of experience, outcomes and impact mechanisms relating to digital mental health communities is difficult to capture. In this paper we demonstrate the development of an online experience measure for a specific children and young people's community forum inside a digital mental health service. The development of the Peer Online Community Experience Measure (POCEM) is informed by a multi-phased design: (i) item reduction through Estimate-Talk-Estimate modified Delphi methods, (ii) user testing with think-aloud protocols and (iii) a pilot study within the digital service community to explore observational data within the platform. Experts in the field were consulted to help reduce the items in the pool and to check their theoretical coherence. User testing workshops helped to inform the usability appearance, wording, and purpose of the measure. Finally, the pilot results highlight completion rates, differences in scores for age and roles and "relate to others", as the most frequent domain mechanism of support for this community. Outcomes frequently selected show the importance of certain aspects of the community, such as safety, connection, and non-judgment previously highlighted in the literature. Experience measures like this one could be used as indicators of active therapeutic engagement within the forum community and its content but further research is required to ascertain its acceptability and validity. Multi-phased approaches involving stakeholders and user-centred design activities enhances the development of digitally enabled measurement tools.