One in five children and young people in the UK now need mental health support, yet some wait up to two years for help. This project builds a digital creative therapy tool—e-Arts-for-the-Blues—so therapists can run group sessions remotely for children referred with depression and anxiety. Current digital mental health interventions rely almost entirely on talking therapies, even though children themselves repeatedly ask for creative approaches. The Arts for the Blues model already works in schools and hospitals; this study adapts it into a digital platform. Researchers will co-create the prototype with four children who have used creative therapies and four experienced therapists, then test it with 8–10 children in a real therapy group. If successful, e-Arts-for-the-Blues would become the first evidence-based digital creative therapy for this age group. It would let therapists reach more children remotely, cutting travel burdens and long waiting lists. The tool targets a gap in NHS digital services—not more talk therapy, but a creative alternative that children actually want to use.
View original technical description
The mental health (MH) of children and young people (CYP) is seriously concerning with an upward trend indicating that 1 in 5 CYP currently need MH support. This increase suggests alarming projections for the MH of future generations. Even though improving access to MH services for 0-17 year olds is an NHS priority, most CYP not receiving timely support with some CYP having to wait up as long as two years. In many cases, they have to travel long distances, which is tiring, expensive and time consuming, exposing CYP to physical and emotional risks. Digital interventions can reduce wait times and reach more CYP sooner, but they are currently limited to talking therapies only. Few resources are available to therapists to use that make therapy attractive to CYP and suitable to their MH needs. For example, despite the value CYP place in creative interventions and overwhelming requests from CYP themselves for creative approaches to support their MH, digital interventions based on evidence-based creative therapies are largely unavailable. During this study we will use the Arts for the Blues model, an evidence-based creative group therapy used with CYP in schools and hospitals and build on the work we have already done with our existing platform (TRL3) (www.artsforthebluespractice.co.uk) and the list of digital activities we have already tested with clients (TRL4). We will develop an e-Arts-for-the-Blues digital resource to enable practitioners to deliver creative group therapy remotely with CYP referred to MH services due to concerns around their overall MH and specifically depression and anxiety. Waiting lists will be particularly targeted. During the course of the study, we will seek to answer the following research question: How useable and acceptable is e-Arts-for-the-Blues for CYP referred to MH services and their therapists? We will answer this question through three work packages: A. Preparation We will set up two Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) groups in order to establish user requirements. Specifically we will invite (i) four CYP who have used creative therapies and (ii) four therapists with experience of working with CYP creatively. B. Development The e-Arts-for-the-Blues prototype will be co-created iteratively with direct input from our PPI CYP and therapists. Low fidelity prototypes will be used to test and evaluate the user interface and overall experience of the environment from the CYP’s and practitioners’ perspectives. Workshops and focus groups will be conducted to assure that the final prototype is of high fidelity and workable performance. C. Testing We will test the high-fidelity prototype of e-Arts-for-the-Blues with 8-10 CYP during a creative therapy group, assessing useability from both the perspective of the therapists delivering the sessions as well as the participating CYP using the System Useability Scale (SUS) for the practitioners and the adapted version of SUS with CYP. If the development e-Arts-for-the-Blues is acceptable and beneficial for CYP, and useful to therapists, it will be a unique product in the market since it will be the first and only product based on creative therapies for this age group and mental health concern. It will also be the only product that will be offered as support to therapists encouraging them to offer group therapy to a larger number of CYP remotely, thus reducing waiting time for CYP.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know