Designing youth-relevant online mental health content for children and adolescents: a rapid review of the evidence
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BackgroundWhile young people’s engagement with digital content is diverse, digital interactions can have both positive and negative effects on young people’s mental health. Discussions about adolescent wellbeing in the digital age tend to focus on the opportunities and risks associated with digital technologies, such as debates over screen time and use of different social media platforms. Developmental milestones and their associated capacities have previously been used as a theoretical foundation for evidence-informed developmental approaches to building mental health literacy offline. AimsThis review aimed to map out the current practices used when communicating mental health promotion content online for young people. MethodologyThe authors conducted a rapid review of existing literature. A comprehensive search was conducted for peer-reviewed papers in English, published between 2010 and July 2023. Data sources included PubMed Scopus, PsychArticles, and Google Scholar. ResultsThe study revealed that while many existing studies set out to design online youth-relevant mental health content, co-design and participatory approaches are still at an early stage in this field. There is a lack of guidance and evidence available on how online mental health promotion and prevention could be developmentally staged. While the studies included in this review commented on creating age-appropriate content, none referred to a direct conceptual reasoning or theoretical framework guiding developmental staging. A further key gap in the included peer-reviewed literature is that there was no discussion of the use of online content by younger children (those aged under 12). A promising way forward could be adapting frameworks from other fields to the digital space. For example, Kågström et al’s 2023 work provided a first-ever framework for mapping mental health literacy-related content on to developmental milestones.ConclusionsExisting frameworks mapping mental health literacy curricula on developmental milestones can be used to build developmentally appropriate mental health content – and content should be co-designed with young people.
