Mental health solutions by and for young people tidings

To learn how to best reach young users, New Jersey-based mental health training provider MindRight Health conducted interviews with hundreds of teenagers. The interviewers asked the children, “How does someone earn your trust?”

“We sat down and listened to hours and hours of answers,” MindRight CEO Ashley Edwards said during a panel Friday at Aspen Ideas: Health. “And a lot of those young people said to us, ‘Nobody’s ever bothered to ask me that question before.’

Later, Edwards said respondents informed MindRight how to provide youth mental health care in ways that made teens feel comfortable and kept them engaged.

“Despite the fact that we move towards what the user expects, we move towards what the user expects from us,” said Edwards.

One audience member — who identified herself as an entrepreneur in mental health care in Nigeria — said Edwards’ approach resonated with her, even when speaking to young people an ocean away.

“Young people should get the solutions they want,” the audience member said. “Not the ones that make them look like little adults. Children must be children.â€

Edwards was one of several speakers at two Ideas: Health events on Friday to highlight the importance of including the views and knowledge of teenagers in the growing effort to address their age group’s troubling rise in mental health issues.

Friday’s speakers represented a wide range of actors fighting worsening trends in adolescent mental health, which U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called an “emergency” in a June 17 New York Times essay. Panelists brought perspectives from nonprofits, private companies, and the federal government

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, emergency department visits for mental health diagnoses by US children under the age of 17 increased by 11.5% between 2016 and 2020, while deaths by suicide among adolescents between 12-17 increased by 75.7% between 2008 and 2021. The department says the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these trends

Locally, high school students in five Western Slope counties, which include the Roaring Fork Valley, reported a marked decline in suicidal ideation and depression between 2021 and 2023, according to the Colorado Kids Health Survey, following the peak of the pandemic. .

To combat the crisis, speakers said the country has seen an explosion in the tools and programs available to improve the inner lives of young people.

The main issue in mental health care right now, the speakers agreed, is not a lack of solutions, or even access to those solutions, but a lack of engagement.Â

Tom Insel, co-founder and chief executive officer at Vanna Health, said a large proportion of people who need or could be treated for mental disorders choose not to seek it even when treatment is available to them.

“For mental health, the biggest problem is engagement, not access,” Insel said. “They don’t seek care. They don’t want it. They don’t buy what we sell. Unlike what you see with infectious diseases or heart disease or cancer, the more severe the mental issue, the less likely people to get involved (with treatment).

Edwards said that communicating with young people directly helps combat these issues with engagement. Edwards and the other panelists also touted her company’s outstanding record of carefully keeping new users engaged.Â

“Our most active users have (used) MindRight every day for five or six years,” Edwards said, saying the high level of user retention is one reason MindRight’s services are now covered by Medicaid in some states. Â

MindRight connects users, typically young people of color, with a mental health coach who communicates with them via text. Trainers are supervised by licensed physicians.

At the heart of her approach, Edwards said, is approaching teenagers in ways that work for them. In addition to using culturally appropriate methods for communities of color, MindRight uses approaches designed around data from youth.Â

When Edwards first sought capital investment for MindRight, she said investors usually pushed her to use a chatbot instead of relying on SMS messages.Â

“In every investor meeting I had, they turned me down because they wanted to see a chatbot,” Edwards said. “But I stood firm because after working with hundreds and now thousands of young people and talking to them, none of my young people want to talk to a chatbot. In fact, I can’t tell you how many people write to us saying, “Hey, you’re a real person, right?”

Now, Edwards said her hunch has been proven correct

“There have been lessons time and time again that adults cannot define what an intervention looks like or what recovery looks like for young people. Only youth can determine that,” Edwards said

Panelist Margaret Laws, CEO of San Francisco-based mental health investor group Hopelab, said directly engaging young people when creating products is a key factor her company looks for when deciding whether to invest in a startup. mental health. Hopelab invested in MindRight in 2021. Laws praised Edwards for her company’s high level of user engagement.Â

Beyond the private sector, psychologist and author Lisa Damour argued that direct communication with young people is especially important for school mental health programs. Students, Damour argued, know more about their peers than administrators. They can alert adults to their friends’ mental health problems before they turn into a crisis

Damour said she encourages the schools she works with to gather “six of their most open-minded youth” in a room and ask them if they would feel comfortable telling an adult at school about a peer with troubling issues. The school must then work to address whatever the student says in response.Â

“You can have the greatest health and wellness program in the world, but if students don’t feel like they can tell an adult which peers they care about, you have nothing,” Damour said.

Damour said she was impressed by the teenagers’ abilities to adapt and cope with the struggle in their own ways, arguing that their care and knowledge of each other is a critical resource for mental health professionals.

At the end of Damour’s panel, moderator and journalist Savannah Sellers asked the speakers how they saw the future of mental health care in the United States.

“I have faith in youth,” said US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine. ”They are our future. They understand what the challenges are and I think with our help and guidance, they are able to handle it.