We announce the expansion of our youth services to reach millions more people with essential support through The Mix and take three million conversations through the Shout text messaging mental health service.
Today The Prince of Wales attended an event to mark the merger of Mental Health Innovations with The Mix, expanding our offering to millions more people. We’re now the largest provider of free, digital mental health support for children, young people and adults in the UK, and custodian of a uniquely important dataset about the mental health of the nation.
His Royal Highness was introduced to members of the Mental Health Innovations Youth Advisory Board, who explained the key role that young people play in the design, co-creation and delivery of our youth services and outlined the many opportunities to get involved, join a supportive community and gain valuable skills.
The Prince heard about our plans to launch a brand new digital ecosystem of early intervention support for young people through content, community, counselling and crisis support, provided through a new digital interface for The Mix. A raft of innovative products will include self-paced learning tools to help young people gain understanding and skills for their mental health and the roll out of the UK’s first national Peer Chat service.
Mental Health Innovations powers the Shout text message service and The Prince heard how Shout Volunteers have reached the milestone of taking three million supportive text message conversations with people in mental health crisis across the UK. His Royal Highness met mental health activist and Shout Volunteer Ben West, who described how his volunteering role helps him make a difference to the many people seeking Shout’s crisis support.
The Prince then met experts including Professor The Lord Ara Darzi, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Professor Sir Simon Wessely, Regus Chair of Psychiatry, King’s College London, Professor Peter Fonagy, UCL and Rosie Johnston-Luff from Google to hear how Imperial College London collaborates with the Mental Health Innovations world class data insights and data science team. Together we deploy the most powerful new developments in data science, machine learning and generative AI to generate insight from our unparalleled dataset. This helps us understand what is driving the decline in young people’s mental health and determine what we can do to reverse it. Through the learnings from this rich and vital evidence base we not only refine their service offering and feed into the development of new product innovation, but also inform the sector, government, and the NHS in order to realise a common purpose: to transform mental health nationwide.
