Summary
Early intervention is crucial to addressing mental health difficulties. It can have a transformative impact, preventing young people from falling into crisis. Professor Coyle and Dr Pretorius’s research focuses on help-seeking, a critical first step in enabling early intervention. Help-seeking for mental health difficulties is often understood as a situation where a person communicates their distress to others with the goal of getting help in the form of understanding, advice, information, treatment or general support. Evidence suggests that help-seeking in young people usually starts online. Prior to this research, online help-seeking was poorly understood. Working in close collaboration with Irish mental health organisations, the research team has developed evidence-based resources to support improved online help-seeking. This research has had a direct impact on young people and has been used by spunout, a website which shares factual information on mental health and wellbeing. The research has also informed the design of a new youth help-seeking platform, developed by spunout, and endorsed by the Minister of State in the Department of Health (Mental Health and Older People), Mary Butler.
Research description
This research focused on how young people experiencing mental health difficulties seek help online. It began with a systematic review of the barriers and facilitators young people experience. The resulting paper, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is amongst its most highly cited papers of the past five years and it is cited in the World Health Organisation Global Report on Assistive Technology.
To better understand the experiences of young people in Ireland, the researchers conducted a large-scale cross-sectional survey. This allowed them to identify key groups, including:
- those seeking online help for the purposes of obtaining information on mental health;
- those seeking to speak to an actual person about their issues;
- those in crisis who need urgent mental health support.
In collaboration with Jigsaw, the team conducted a series of workshops involving 35 members of the Jigsaw youth advisory panel. As a result, the team developed and evaluated a series of interactive help-seeking prototypes.
Through this work the team also developed a new theoretical model of online help-seeking. It combined prior offline theories, needs-based motivational theories, and information-seeking theories drawn from computer science literature.
As a result of this research, the team were able to identify key design criteria for future digital services, including:
- the need for accessible and trustworthy information online;
- recognition of different levels of need and different levels of mental health literacy amongst help-seekers;
- support of different types of human connectedness;
- support for both immediate and long-term action.
Estimates suggest that mental health problems affect 84 million people (1 in 6) in the EU. Large-scale studies also conclude that many people experiencing mental health difficulties face significant barriers in accessing appropriate help. Young people have been identified as particularly vulnerable. The European Commission has stated that “Europe is witnessing a worsening of the mental health of the younger generations”. Reflecting this, the European Youth Strategy and European Youth Goals (2019-2027) call for urgent action targeting youth mental health.