2:15 PM - 2:20 PM
S5.3 - Facilitator
2:20 PM - 2:40 PM
45249 - Nurturing Strong Beginnings: Evaluating A Distance Skill-Based Mental Health and Parenting Support Program for the Perinatal-2-year Period
Mrs. Pauline Penney, Policy and Program Development Specialist, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador; Dept of Health & Community Services - Mental Health & Addictions Division
Strongest Family Institute (SFI) is an award-winning, not-for-profit organization that leverages technology and trained staff to deliver evidence-based programs to children, youth, adults and families. SFI’s universal stepped care system offers varying levels of program intensity to address mental health needs, spanning promotion, prevention, and intervention for mild to moderate issues.SFI system is grounded in more than 25 years of social science research and designed to scale, quickly reducing waitlists. Since 2017, SFI programs have been integrated within the Newfoundland & Labrador’s Provincial Stepped Care Model, with tailored programming to fill gaps across the service continuum.
Based on the SFI’s telephone coaching model, the Strongest Beginnings program will provide early intervention to equip parents with practical skills and resources to improve their mental health and strengthen the parent-child relationship. By promoting effective attachment and fostering positive parenting practices, the program supports optimal child development during the critical 0-3 age period. Through an evidence-based approach, using a CBT-based intervention and skill-building for stress management and emotional regulation, parents can improve their own mental well-being while nurturing secure attachment and responsive caregiving practices. With the addition of the Strongest Beginnings program, SFI will be equipped to provide support to all ages, across the lifespan, through all phases of life.
The scope of this research project is to develop SFI’s Strongest Beginnings Program through a co-design approach, evaluate impacts and satisfaction, revise enhancements where needed and then broadly disseminate. This is a Newfoundland and Labrador-based clinical series. The core components of this six week, weekly coached 0-2 parenting intervention will include:
1. Positive Parenting skills;
2. Anxiety, Depression and stress-relief skills; and
3. Attachment skills to improve parent-infant/child bonds.
Using SFI’s co-design approach, the intervention will build upon SFI’s existing validated skill-based programs (i.e. Parents Empowering Kids positive parenting; MOM postpartum depression; and ICAN adult anxiety, depression and stress) and include additional skills to help foster secure attachment with newborns and/or other children in their care.
The Strongest Beginnings program addresses a crucial gap in services by supporting perinatal mental wellness, preventing and intervening in postpartum blues, and fostering early positive parenting practices. Through attachment theory-based skills, it emphasizes the development of stronger parent-child bonds. This pilot project highlights the promising potential of evidence-based, CBT-driven interventions to enhance these bonds and promote healthier family dynamics during the perinatal period. By focusing on this vital stage, the program lays a foundation for stronger beginnings for children and healthier families.
We will have co-design information early evaluation findings to report by the 10th Digital Mental Health Global Congress 2025.
2:40 PM - 2:50 PM
46905 - Using Youth Engaged Participatory Research to Improve the Equitable Assessment of Mental Health
Adolescence is a key developmental period with respect to the onset of mental health disorders, with over half of life-long disorders beginning during this time. Access to early intervention and consistent mental health services are essential to improving outcomes. Young people from marginalized and historically underserved communities face considerable barriers accessing mental health services, leaving many without support during critical periods. When services are available, they often feel misaligned with their needs or lived experiences, reflecting broader patterns of institutional distrust, over-surveillance, and punitive responses to distress. The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and integration with digital mental health tools has aimed to address gaps in care where traditional mental health services still present considerable barriers. Unlike traditional care systems, smartphone access has become ubiquitous globally, including in more rural and remote regions, offering an invaluable opportunity to expand the reach of mental health resources. The majority of young people now turn to the internet as a first step when seeking support for mental health concerns, including the use of online self-assessment tools and AI chatbots. While expanding access to these tools may offer new entry points to care, particularly for those underserved by traditional services, many digital tools intended to address these gaps are developed rapidly to meet commercial or institutional demand, and often lack rigorous validation or safeguards for vulnerable populations. Despite significant interest and high initial adoption rates, youth frequently report feeling sceptical about the safety, efficacy and cultural relevance of digital mental health programs, resulting in poor long term engagement and limited impact on outcomes. This is particularly true for youth from marginalized and underserved backgrounds, who are rarely involved in the research and design process despite their unique perspectives and needs. Without deliberate and consistent integration of youth voice in the development process, digital mental health tools may not only reinforce but exacerbate the same dynamics of exclusion and harm they aim to disrupt.
In this talk we will describe our experience integrating youth participatory action research (YPAR) and community based participatory research (CBPR) models into our existing research and development framework. We invited interns from the Child Mind Institute’s Youth Mental Health Academy to join as research partners and collaborators to develop and pilot a research program investigating accessibility, cultural attunement, and points of concern in common digital mental health assessments. Youth researchers co-designed and facilitated weekly sessions that integrated data collection, group dialogues, and critical reflection. Importantly, both adult and youth researchers engaged in reflective journaling throughout the process and engaged in dialogue about tension points identified by this practice, creating opportunities to realign with the goals and values of the project. By directly engaging underserved and underrepresented youth in the research process, we set out to develop mental health tools capable of advancing just and responsive care for everyone.
2:50 PM - 3:00 PM
46727 - Applying An AI-Powered Mental Health Literacy Intervention to Enhance Adolescent Mental Health
Adolescent mental health is a recognized national priority and a major societal challenge in Canada. Mental health literacy programs have shown that improving knowledge and reducing stigma can empower young people to recognize problems in themselves and their peers and to seek help earlier, which in turn facilitates earlier intervention and better outcomes. However, traditional programs (e.g. school-based workshops) face scalability issues and mixed evidence on sustained behavior change. We need innovative solutions that promote mental well-being, prevent crises, and personalize interventions at scale. We plan to address the challenge through building an evidence-based mental health literacy (MHL) approach integrating recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that is proactive, culturally inclusive, and scalable.
We will develop and evaluate an interactive digital MHL intervention and promote mental health among adolescents. This intervention will be built on an existing evidence-informed MHL curriculum, designed for teachers to use in the classroom: Elementary Mental Health Literacy Resource (EMHLR) for grades 4-6 students (ages of 9-12). Adolescent participants will be invited to provide their perspectives on how to best apply AI into the current EMHLR modules.
As a result, the proposed project expects to create: (a) a library of AI-curated MHL content, (b) a chatbot-based user interface that can simulate supportive conversations about mental health, and (c) a suite of interactive activities to build skills in resilience, coping, and help-seeking. All these activities will be implemented under the teachers’ supervision, who will receive training from the project team.
A cluster-controlled study will compare schools using the AI MHL literacy platform vs. control schools using the standard EMHLR, measuring MHL and mental health outcomes: knowledge with based on the content of the standard EMHLR; stigma with a 12-item validated stigma scale; help-seeking with a 5-item validated scale; wellbeing with the validated 5-item World Health Organization Wellbeing Index (WHO-5); and stress with the validated 14-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS).
If successful, we aim to disseminate the AI-powered MHL intervention at the national and international levels to address adolescent mental health, particularly among underserved adolescents.
3:00 PM - 3:10 PM
45319 - A Youth Perspective on Peer Support Beyond the Script: Designing Digital Care that Connects
In many parts of the world, young people turn to each other first when they are struggling. Not to professionals, but to friends, siblings, or trusted peers. This reality, however, is rarely reflected in mental health literacy programs. Most focus on symptoms, safety protocols, and referrals. They often rely on scripted content that teaches young people what to repeat, rather than how to provide authentic support.
In one of my university classes, I heard a student who had reached out for help say the system “just feels so robotic.” I knew what they meant. After five years of volunteering at a youth distress centre, I’ve been trained to follow the right steps: how to open a chat, de-escalate a crisis, and get someone to safety in about 45 minutes. That’s what helplines are built to do, and for good reason. But over time, I found myself having the same conversation with the same people again and again. It started to feel mechanical, like care had become a checklist. It worked in the short term, but nothing really shifted. The most powerful conversations I’ve had were never about completing a process. They were about being real, in a way that created trust and space. And that’s something current systems rarely teach.
When I was 12, one of my closest friends was suicidal. I stayed up late for days, just in case they needed me in the middle of the night. Everyone in our friend group was struggling in some way, and we felt an unspoken pressure to keep each other alive. We had no idea what we were doing, but we also didn’t trust the adults around us to know how to help. That kind of story is not rare.
This talk is not a critique of professionals or helplines. It is a call to expand the role of youth peer support. Many of us are already holding each other up. What we lack are the tools, language, and systems to do it safely and sustainably. I will share some practices and ideas I have seen work. What if mental health literacy included emotional presence, cultural nuance, and relational learning? What if digital tools supported nonlinear, intuitive conversations with checklists and scripts as supports, not the main feature?
We need to move beyond awareness into prevention. Young people are not trying to replace professionals. We are asking to be trusted as part of the solution. The question is not whether this is possible; it is whether you believe youth are also capable of constructive, valuable care.
3:10 PM - 3:20 PM
A029 - How Digital Interventions Can Better Serve Post-Secondary Students
Dr. Pedro Velmovitsky, Scientific Associate, Centre for Digital Therapeutics - University Health Network
Post-secondary students are facing a growing mental health crisis. Approximately one-third of post-secondary students in Canada screen positive for clinically significant symptoms of depression or anxiety, yet less than 10% of students receive treatment due to structural and psychological barriers. In response, digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) have emerged as a potential scalable approach to augment traditional service delivery, but must be built to reflect how students' uniquely experience, report, and engage with their mental health. For this reason, the presentation will first discuss findings from a literature review examining the performance of psychometric measures for depression and anxiety in student and adult populations, reinforcing that applying adult screening thresholds in DMHIs may compromise accuracy and care equity in students. Second, it will introduce Fort, a digital front door that integrates with campus mental health services to provide centralized, student-centred access to care. It will describe Fort’s clinical recommendation that combines self-reported psychometric data and clinically defined rules with machine learning to assess current and future risk of depression and anxiety and signpost to stepped care levels. Lastly, the presentation will showcase the concurrent co-design of a digital mental health self-monitoring indicator that aggregates validated psychometric inputs into an actionable visualization to support behaviour change. Collectively, these efforts advance a student-centered digital mental health ecosystem.
3:20 PM - 3:30 PM
45169 - Bridging the Gap: Innovating Youth Mental Health Care through AI and Teletherapy
As youth mental health challenges continue to escalate globally, access to timely, culturally responsive, and affordable care remains a significant barrier—especially for marginalized and underserved populations. This session will present an innovative, tech-enabled model for solving this crisis, grounded in real-world implementation and outcomes.
Hafeezah Muhammad, Founder & CEO of Backpack Healthcare, will share her organization’s experience delivering AI-supported mental health and psychiatry services to children and adolescents across the United States. Backpack Healthcare is a virtual-first platform that integrates AI-powered assessment tools, licensed clinicians, and family-focused support to provide equitable and scalable care to youth—primarily those on Medicaid, in rural areas, or from communities of color.
The presentation will begin with a short overview of the systemic issues facing families today, including provider shortages, long waitlists, stigma, and disparities in care for BIPOC youth. Hafeezah will then describe how Backpack Healthcare’s platform uses artificial intelligence to streamline clinical intake, identify risk levels, and support early intervention—allowing children to receive care faster and clinicians to spend more time on treatment versus administration.
Using case studies and outcome data, the session will illustrate how Backpack’s model achieves faster access, stronger engagement, and improved mental health outcomes for children and teens. Attendees will also learn how the platform intentionally incorporates cultural responsiveness, parent engagement, and trauma-informed design into both the technology and clinical delivery.
Key components that will be presented include:
AI-driven pre-screening and triage workflows
Teletherapy and telepsychiatry integration
Data-informed care coordination
Equity-first design principles
Community partnerships with schools and pediatric providers
The session will conclude with a forward-looking discussion on policy and funding models needed to support digital mental health infrastructure and recommendations for scaling solutions like Backpack Healthcare globally. It will also explore how similar digital approaches can be adapted to local needs and systems, with a focus on retaining cultural relevance and human connection.
Why this matters: This is more than a product demo. It’s a proven, holistic approach to reaching youth who are too often left behind—and a compelling case study of how digital innovation, when done right, can transform access and outcomes in mental health care for the next generation.
3:30 PM - 3:40 PM
46521 - Charting the Future of Youth Wellness: Developing Canada's First National Service Navigation Tool
Ms. Alisa Simon, Group Head & Executive Vice President, e-Mental Health Transformation & Clinical Services, Kids Help Phone
Attendees will hear how co-creation techniques were leveraged in the development of Resources Around Me tool to transform the experiences of youth into a tangible service evolution. This included engaging youth to identify navigation challenges, collaboration with youth advisors on the discovery, design and implementation phases of the re-design, and engagement with young people and caring adults through prototype feedback sessions.
Kids Help Phone’s free digital tool – Resources Around Me – hosts an ever-growing list of 40,000 supports available to young people, including physical resources, virtual supports and a verified database of trusted mental health mobile apps. This added functionality, leveraging apps from a partner database (Mindapps database), allows young people to access safe mobile apps that connect them to supports and self-directed activities, all vetted by trained youth utilizing a robust evaluation framework.
Our evaluation methodology for resources focuses on including ones that are accessible and inclusive - financially, physically, socially, digitally and educationally. We also incorporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into our curation process through creating safe spaces and opportunities to connect with community representatives from equity-deserving communities (including Indigenous, Black and Newcomer communities) to gather suggestions for resources/ services to include.
In order to further amplify and support young people’s system navigation through digital spaces that they are already visiting, we are also leveraging a partnership-first strategy and embedding technology for youth community organizations and mental health agencies across Canada to implement the tool right within their own websites.
We’ve had over 87,000 visits to the Resources Around Me page since its launch in September 2024, and to further amplify the implementation of this tool, we are working with over 50 community organizations across Canada to embed Resources Around Me within their own websites.