Further development and feasibility trial of a Web-based psychoeducational intervention for adolescent depression (Digital support for young people with their mood and wellbeing)

End of project summery

Main Messages

Depression is common in adolescence and guidelines stress the need for good information and evidence-based psychosocial and digital interventions for individuals and families/carers. As part of an earlier National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)/Health and Care Research Wales Doctoral Fellowship, we co-developed a digital programme with young people and others to support their mood and wellbeing, 'MoodHwb' ('hwb' is a Welsh translation for 'hub' and means a 'lift' or 'boost'). This NIHR/ Health and Care Research Wales Post Doctoral Fellowship project aimed to 1) refine the programme based on feedback from an early evaluation, workshops with a digital media company, literature reviews, and collaboration with young people and practitioners, and 2) to assess the acceptability and feasibility of MoodHwb and evaluation processes in a trial in schools, health services, charities and other settings across Wales and Scotland.

These are the main achievements from the fellowship:

• We co-developed a second version of the MoodHwb programme to support young people with their mood and wellbeing. We improved the navigation, audiovisual and interactive elements, made it more personalised, developed the app version, and expanded the self-help and anxiety content.
• We published two reviews to help guide us and other practitioners in the field, on: 1) the co-design of digital mental health technologies with children and young people, and 2) digital technologies to support adolescents with depression and anxiety. Please see the details of the reviews in the detailed study reports.
• The co-development work led to a ‘Digital Innovation Award: Best Research on Digital Impact’ by the ‘Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health’.
• We published the plans for the trial in the open-access BMJ Open journal.
• We reached the trial recruitment target of 120 young people and the retention target of 75% or over (i.e. percentage who completed the trial), despite challenges (e.g. related to the COVID-19 pandemic). The feedback on MoodHwb so far has been favourable. All this indicates that we can progress to the next stage.
• We are analysing the trial data, and the findings will help us to plan the next steps, so that, if proven to be effective, we can ultimately roll out the programme to support young people, families/carers, and practitioners.