11:15 AM - 11:20 AM
S4.3 - Facilitator
11:20 AM - 11:30 AM
47055 - Co-Creating Technology Solutions for Community Children and Youth Mental Health Providers
Ms. Angela Simo Brown, President and CEO, Capitalize for Kids
In this presentation, participants will learn more about some of the largest challenges facing the child and youth mental health (CYMH) sector in Canada, such as implementing tools to promote better outcomes, data and improve clinical efficiencies. This session will be led by Capitalize for Kids (C4K), a non-profit organization that works in collaboration with mental health providers across Canada to implement solutions to some of the biggest challenges in the sector. C4K leverages its internal consulting team and pro-bono consulting partners to execute high-impact operational and clinical improvement projects at no charge or low-cost to community agencies.
This session will provide a brief overview of how C4K was founded and how it is able to raise funding and execute an impact model for the benefit of children, youth and families in Canada facing mental health challenges.
The presentation will also include an overview of two key eMental Health-related projects:
1) The Measurement-Based Care (MBC) Accelerator Project, and 2) An AI Report Writer Pilot for community child and youth mental health agencies. The MBC Accelerator Project is a 5-year initiative led by C4K with 17 community child and youth mental health agencies. The project involves the implementation of measurement-based care technology and clinical/data process changes that will enable kids, youth and families to better understand treatment outcomes routinely. This MBC data is then used to engage with the client and clinician in each clinical session, to collaboratively discuss treatment trajectory and make decisions the guide care. The project also includes workstreams in evaluation/research and the creation of a common database of MBC outcomes and client journey data to enable a Learning Health System model for continuous improvement and learning across the agencies. The session will provide an overview of this ambitious project as well as a status update on implementation. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Report Writing pilot is a project with a Toronto-based community child and youth agency that wants to reduce the administrative burden on busy clinicians who are spending too much non-value-added time documenting client sessions for reporting purposes. While AI is beginning to be used in acute care hospitals and primary care clinics, community child and youth mental health services are not typically funded or supported to implement new technologies early in the technology adoption cycle. The session will provide an overview of the project and key learnings from implementation to date.
11:30 AM - 11:40 AM
47385 - Young People in the Digital Era
The demand for virtual mental and substance use health and addictions services was already on the rise before the pandemic made them a necessity. Technology has the potential to address many of Ontario’s Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions access-to-care issues, including wait times, culture and language, stigma, geography and health literacy. The Knowledge Institute has been building evidence, guidelines, reports, implementation supports and conducting evaluations to help support the sector's adoption of virtual care.
11:40 AM - 11:50 AM
A013 - When Experience Meets Innovation: Building a New Model for Youth Mental Health
Mrs Kate Newhouse, CEO, Kooth
For more than 20 years, Kooth has pioneered digital mental health with the NHS in the UK, helping young people access care at their first moment of need. Now, as a core component of California’s Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI), Kooth has brought that experience stateside to design and launch Soluna — the nation’s first statewide digital mental health service co-designed with youth to remove barriers, expand access, and complement existing supports.
Built through extensive co-design with 300+ California youth, Soluna reflects their insights on access, identity, and wellbeing. The Soluna Young Adult Ambassador Program extends this partnership, empowering college students to lead advocacy, events, and social campaigns that amplify youth voices statewide.
This session explores how co-created innovation and authentic youth partnership can deliver scalable, equitable, and culturally responsive care — and how public investment, technology, and lived experience can come together to change the future of youth mental health.
11:50 AM - 12:00 PM
46908 - A Hybrid Machine Learning Approach to Safe and Consistent Crisis Detection in Digital Platforms
Digital platforms are increasingly used for communication, self-expression, and chronicling of lived experiences. From classical social media platforms like Facebook to forums such as Reddit, or digital journaling applications such as our own Mirror Journal from the Child Mind Institute, users regularly express themselves online. While the most social of these environments provide transparency such that friends or family members may be able to notice when a loved one is experiencing distress and intervene, that is far from ubiquitous. Platforms such as Reddit or journaling apps provide no obvious avenue for crisis detection or intervention by community members or care professionals. Unfortunately, this lack of transparency and connection overlaps significantly with where individuals experiencing distress may go to express themselves — for example, the SuicideWatch Reddit community has over half a million active users. Natural language processing (NLP) and AI tools such as Large Language Models (LLMs) may provide an opportunity to process posts or entries in this space and present helpful resources to users experiencing or conveying severe distress. However, the lack of transparency in the performance of LLMs, their use of data, and their regular refusal to perform certain tasks severely limits our ability to use these tools in a way that is consistently safe for users.
In this presentation, we will demonstrate and walk through our multi-level risk and crisis detection tool that we developed and have actively deployed in the Mirror Journal digital journaling application. This approach leverages open datasets and NLP modelling to build a stable and deterministic foundation for assessing risk based on concerns of self-harm or suicidal ideation. Once we developed a fine-tuned model for binary classification of self-harm, we worked with clinicians to annotate 1,000 journal entries with a status of no risk, concerning, or high risk, and used this as the basis for further fine-tuning. Finally, we use local-LLM agents to provide additional coverage that expands this evaluation to domains where less public data is available (e.g., sexual violence), to provide a secondary safeguard. Once entries have gone through this evaluation flow, we cater to users’ experiences accordingly. In the case of no-risk entries, users are provided with relatively unstructured local-LLM-generated summaries of their journaling entries for reflection. In the case of concerning entries, these summaries are heavily constrained to rely on strict ‘grammars’ that limit how the LLM can respond, including limiting responses to clinically-approved templates, and providing explicit pointers to care and support. In high risk cases, users receive no summary and are directed urgently to their care and support page, where they are further directed to reach out to their trusted contacts or care services. In the two months since being integrated into our application (1,000 daily active users), approximately 10% of entries have been flagged as concerning, and 2% flagged as high risk, with a total of 300 individuals reaching out to 9-1-1, 9-8-8, or a crisis helpline.
12:00 PM - 12:10 PM
40462 - Why is this Mental Health App not Deleted in 30 Seconds? Lessons Learned from Foundry BC Platform
Introduction: On average, most youth apps only last 2 weeks, and the average lifespan of a youth mental health app can vary widely depending on several factors, including the quality of the app, market demand, competition and ongoing support and updates. Successful app development and scaling is rare and hinges on a combination of strategic planning, user-centered design and iterative improvement and investments over time. In 2020, Foundry developed the Foundry BC platform to deliver virtual integrated youth services to complement the existing in-person services provided in communities across British Columbia (BC). The platform consists of an Android app, IOS app, and Website components. This presentation will demonstrate the Foundry BC platform and discuss the keys to successful scaling, evaluation, engagement and innovation. We will also describe the function of the platform for youth, caregivers, service providers and administrators.
Experiences: Based on the last four years, over 40,000 youth and caregivers across BC have registered on the Foundry BC platform. Key factors to successful implementation of the platform include a clear understanding of the target market and user needs (including youth, caregivers, service providers and administrators), extensive listening and engagement to ensure the creation of meaningful, evidence-based and intuitive content, as well as technological expertise to ensure responsive innovation. Agile change management methodologies have allowed our team to iteratively develop and rapidly adapt to user feedback, enhancing product relevance and usability. This includes ongoing refinements of the product’s design elements (e.g., interactive features, gamification, sharing of personalized content) and having strong leadership to monitor a regular feedback loop and iterative improvements based on user input, including youth from diverse communities and backgrounds. Robust technical and engagement infrastructure has been essential for scalability, ensuring that the Foundry BC platform can handle increasing user demands without compromising the care provided to youth or slowing service provider efficiency.
Communication strategies and end-user training tactics have been crucial for reaching a broad audience and driving uptake across the province. Finally, this presentation will describe the importance of ongoing data analysis, evaluation and performance monitoring to facilitate informed decision-making and optimization of the platform potential across the network.
Conclusions: By integrating engagement, technology, evaluation and change management elements, our team has been able to create an impactful platform that continues to be successfully scaled up across BC. Effective development and scaling strategies of youth-centred apps need to carefully consider effective engagement strategies of all users over time, enhancing its utility and satisfaction. Furthermore, high levels of engagement and change management throughout the development and scaling processes are critical to developing a product that resonates with the current needs of its audience and supports youth and caregivers in achieving health and wellness goals over time.
12:10 PM - 12:20 PM
42609 - While We Wait: A New Model to Address Adolescents' Psychological Needs with Digital Technologies During the Wait Time for Treatment
The wait time for mental health treatment among adolescents worldwide is a critical period of unmet need that is almost entirely neglected by current service models. In Australia, adolescent help-seekers have reported waiting more than 100 days to access mental health treatment after referral by their General Practitioner (GP). During the wait time, adolescents have significant unmet psychological needs including severe psychological distress, increased use of dangerous and maladaptive coping, and feelings of abandonment. Current wait time offerings across the mental health sector are sparse and lack clear evidence of effectiveness. As such, many adolescents receive minimal targeted care during the wait time and their acute psychological needs remain unmet. This presentation will outline a new service model called While We Wait, which was designed to address the psychological needs of adolescents during the wait time for mental health treatment in Australia using brief digital interventions.
Funded by the Australian Government Medical Research Future Fund, this two-year project unites experts in adolescent mental health with GPs and service providers to develop and test a new service model. In 2024, we partnered with expert health service designers from Deloitte Digital Australia to complete a rapid six-week health service design sprint. This iterative industry-led methodology involved a series of weekly activities including the development of service user personas and service experience principles, targeted service user consultation sessions with General Practitioners and adolescent lived experience advisors (aged 18 to 20 years), insight reporting, and service blueprint development. A total of 15 General Practitioners (GPs) took part in the consultation sessions alongside 12 youth experts. advisors.
The final service design for the While We Wait service consisted of a 5-stage journey: (1) Recognition of the need for support by the adolescent, (2) Initial consultation and onboarding with the GP, (3) Support and monitoring, (4) Preparation for treatment, (5) Transition and follow-up. The service design was underpinned by five key service principles including “I’m never alone”, “It’s for me”, “I’m in control”, “It’s easy to use”, “It lifts me up”. Critical elements of the While We Wait service design will be presented in this talk, including the optimal integration of digital interventions, including an automated SMS-based program and a digital single-session intervention focussed on growth mindset. This talk will also present an overview of this innovative model as well as the results of the pilot study conducted in Australia with 150 young people and their GPs.
12:20 PM - 12:30 PM
46810 - Co-creating Responsible AI for mental Health with Adolescents
Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help youth navigate life’s challenges, particularly in relation to mental well-being?
This talk explores how we can harness the potential of AI, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), to support adolescent well-being, while ensuring that the solutions we develop are safe, equitable, and youth-friendly.
An increasing number of mental health interventions are integrating AI, including chatbots, predictive algorithms, and diagnostic tools. At the same time, general-purpose AI platforms, such as "companion chatbots," are being used by adolescents and young adults (AYA; ages 12–25) to explore or express mental health concerns, even when these tools weren’t originally designed for that purpose.
With rising rates of mental health challenges among young people, many turn to technology for support. AI holds significant promise for delivering accessible, personalized mental health care. However, despite its growing integration into the adolescent mental health landscape, current ethical frameworks for AI and digital mental health often overlook the unique developmental, psychological, and technological contexts of AYA.
Moreover, AI systems are frequently developed without meaningful engagement with youth—particularly those from marginalized groups, such as racial/ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ youth, and socio-economically disadvantaged communities. A lack of indigenous and race-based data further contributes to harmful bias in AI, which disproportionately affects these populations. As a result, AI technologies are impacting young people without adequately reflecting their diverse needs, perspectives, or well-being. To date, global policy and industry efforts have not sufficiently addressed this gap.
In this talk, I will present findings from my work co-creating a prototype LLM-based assistant with adolescents from diverse backgrounds. This assistant is designed to support healthy behaviors and social skills using the open-source Erasmian Large Language Model (ELM). ELM is grounded in community participation, prioritizes privacy and fair labor practices, and offers greater transparency and educational potential than commercial models like ChatGPT.
Additionally, I will discuss my current policy-oreinted research at Stanford University and Hopelab in San Francisco, conducted as part of a Commonwealth Harkness Fellowship. My work examines how responsible AI can be better integrated into youth digital mental health through policy innovation, industry transformation, and direct collaboration with young people themselves.
The talk will conclude with key priorities for future research and an open invitation to collaborate on shaping the future of responsible AI in youth mental health.
12:30 PM - 12:40 PM
A063 - Beyond Single Stories: Centering Black Immigrant Youth Voices in Mental Health Access Research (Canada)
Mental health challenges affect 1 in 5 Canadians, including over one million children annually, yet only 20% receive treatment. Social, cultural, and structural inequities create significant barriers to care, particularly for racialized populations. Black youth face disproportionate challenges: they report the highest distress levels to Kids Help Phone, experiencing greater depression and anxiety than other callers, yet encounter multiple barriers accessing services compared to White counterparts. These barriers stem from systemic racism, cultural misunderstanding that devalues African knowledge systems, financial constraints, and inappropriate service delivery. Immigrant youth receive fewer mental health services than non-immigrants, often accessing care only through emergency or justice system interventions, with alarming police interaction fatalities reflecting broader exclusion patterns. Despite Canada's growing Black population, no published study examines the intersectional experiences of Black immigrant youth of African descent (BIYAD). This represents a critical gap: existing research either aggregates Black youth within broader populations or examines Black youth and immigrants separately, overlooking the complex interplay of multiple identities. The UN Working Group's 2017 mandate to address Canada's African community mental health crisis underscores this study's urgency.
This study addresses this gap by integrating Critical Race Theory with the African-centred "Ubuntu" approach, emphasizing interconnectedness and communal interdependence. BIYAD experience unique, compounding disadvantages from settlement pressures, language barriers, cultural adaptation challenges, and potential trauma from war-affected regions. Understanding their lived experiences is essential for informing equitable policies, challenging discriminatory practices, and advancing social justice initiatives addressing mental health inequities' root causes.