11/03/25

A new approach to tackle children’s mental health

How the mind works: Developing a youth mental health app for a clinical trial with CambridgeBPI and University of Cambridge

How long should a child have to wait for mental health support?

Young people referred to mental health services are frequently forced to wait for months – some even years – before they can get the help they need. In the meantime, they are left to battle through, with many getting more ill as time goes on.

For Professor Ian Goodyer and Dr Raphael Kelvin from CambridgeBPI and the University of Cambridge, this isn’t good enough. They want to explore what can be done for the mental health of 11-18 year olds with new supportive, scientifically-backed resources while they wait.

To make this idea into a reality, they came to us.

Their Cambridge-based team offers teaching and training for face-to-face treatment for adolescent depression through a type of evidence-based therapy called Brief Psychosocial Intervention (BPI). The face-to-face version of BPI is being rolled out by CambridgeBPI across healthcare systems in the UK, Canada, Singapore and the USA. BPI was approved by NICE Guidance as a talking therapy in 2019, having met rigorous clinical and scientific standards.

Over the last twelve months, our writers and designers at Acteon have been working closely with the BPI team to translate this face-to-face therapy into a visually exciting, interactive online intervention.

Informed by CambridgeBPI’s extensive experience and honest feedback from young people, the result is an online app filled with creative content including animation, interactive storytelling and videos filmed expert mental health practitioners who use BPI in their clinics.

Designed to engage the young person in psychoeducation, social intervention and the formation of healthy habits, the app’s impact will be refined with feedback from extensive user experiences. The resulting digital product will be tested in an upcoming clinical trial with participants drawn from waiting lists in NHS services.

For many teenagers, being clearly informed about anxiety, depression and how their mind works marks a key step in their treatment. The app we’re developing will help in three important ways: give them confidence in understanding how their minds work and how this can go wrong when mentally unwell, provide exercises and ways of thinking that help them manage their emotions in the moment, and encourage them to be social and active and recognise that they are not alone in their recovery.

Working on this with the CambridgeBPI team has been a wonderful opportunity for our digital, comms and studio teams to collaborate. We are hugely excited about this project’s potential to support young people with mental health difficulties, and we can’t wait to share more details.