In June 2024, Mental Health Innovations conducted a mental health prioritisation survey in collaboration with our Service User Voice Group (SUVG) and Imperial College’s Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI). The aim of this was to discover areas of mental health that the UK public felt were most important to fund and research, as well as looking at the key areas in which our Shout text service could do more to support people.
The survey was distributed through Shout Volunteers, the SUVG’s networks and online, newsletters, charities and social media (e.g. Facebook groups, X and Instagram). In total, there were 454 respondents from across the United Kingdom, ranging from ages 14-65+. The public were asked to choose up to three of 14 topics (e.g. teenagers’ mental health) that they felt were the most important for researchers, policy makers or charities to focus on in the current climate.
In this blog, Georgie Greenhill, a member of our SUVG explains how the group worked to help shape the survey, and the impact it has had.
What impact did the SUVG have on the survey?
As a member of the SUVG, I was part of the team that came up with topics to include in the list to be prioritised, and refined the demographic questions. The SUVG are a very diverse group from all over the UK, so we also helped to disseminate it to our individual networks. When first looking at the survey, the SUVG wanted to reinforce that all individuals and areas of mental health are important. We also ensured the survey clarified and reassured respondents there would likely be some overlap in topics. For example, we told respondents that if the use of Shout by LGBTQIA+ communities was one of the research topics, other topics such as neurodiversity, different ages and suicide might also be looked at alongside it.
What the results tell us: suicide, social media and neurodiversity are pressing
To ensure the results were presented clearly and concisely for stakeholders to understand, we co-created the below poster displaying a summary of the findings.
Caption: This poster was designed by Inaaya Kaul, public involvement support
Five key areas came out on top from the survey results that highlighted key issues the public clearly feel need to be focused on by researchers, funders, and policy makers.
In order to gain a better understanding of the backgrounds and characteristics of survey respondents and how this may have influenced results, demographic information was also collected, along with how many people chose each option.
- Suicide (180 respondents)
How Shout can better support people who experience suicidal thoughts, as well as what helps people cope with them. - Social media (130 respondents)
Who uses social media to find the Shout service, and how does social media impact mental health? - Neurodiversity (123 respondents)
How Shout can better support people who are neurodivergent e.g. Autism, ADHD, and Dyslexia. - Young adults (18-24) (122 respondents)
How Shout can better support young people with their mental health, looking at issues such as social media, studying, and work. - Teenagers (14-17) (114 respondents)
How Shout can assist teenagers with school stress, social media impact, and relationships.
The survey also asked respondents if there were any topics missing from the list that they felt were important. The top three that came up were eating disorders (10), carers (9), and abuse and loneliness came joint third (7). All of these missing topics could be researched as part of any of the top five, helping develop further insight into these areas, while still remaining focused on the key issues.
With a significant difference in respondent numbers between the first two topics of suicide and social media, it is clear that suicide is at the forefront of people’s minds when thinking about areas for further research. This is unsurprising, given that since 2007 there has been an increasing trend in suicide rates, with 2023 recording the highest number of deaths by suicide since 1999 (Source: ONS, Suicides in England and Wales dataset, Table 1).
Due to the ever-increasing digital world we live in it’s also no wonder that social media scored the second-highest topic of importance.
Social media is imperative to bringing awareness of mental health support to new audiences, particularly younger people, and can help to counteract some of the more negative content people can see in their social media feeds. Through the Shout service, we’re helping to address the gap of people who aren’t under the NHS mental health system, and therefore won’t be signposted to us by healthcare professionals. Of the survey respondents, 42% told us they had a mental health condition but only 15% had used Shout for support. By building our presence across social media, we can help reach more people who don’t know we exist.
While it can connect us, social media has its drawbacks too - promoting unrealistic life and body comparisons, exposure to negative world news content, and cyberbullying to name a few - all of which can contribute to mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression, or general low self-esteem. Researching how social media negatively and positively impacts the mental health of the general population is therefore key in understanding how best to utilise it in a positive way.
One in five, (20%) of respondents were neurodivergent, but neurodiversity was the third most requested topic to be studied, displaying its importance in shaping the future of support services. While people might not be neurodivergent themselves, it’s likely that they will know someone who is. If society was able to accommodate neurodivergent people and help understand and support, perhaps the overall mental health of the general population (both neurodivergent and neurotypical) would be improved.
Survey demographics: connecting with harder to reach audiences
Reaching a broad and representative group of respondents is a common hurdle to overcome in research. Due to the survey being distributed through charities, public involvement networks and Facebook groups and that young people often report survey fatigue, fewer children and young people filled out the survey. Even though over 80% of respondents were over 25, both the topics of young adults (18-24) and teenagers (14-17) were in the top five topics of interest. This shows that older adults are highly interested in issues affecting younger age groups, even if they themselves are not part of those groups.
The demographic information collected also highlighted population areas that were not widely reached through the survey distribution, meaning the results may not accurately represent the views of all communities. For example, 7% of respondents described their ethnicity as Asian, 2% as Black, 3% as Mixed, with no representation from Arab or Gypsy or Irish Traveller communities, highlighting that ethnic minority communities were underrepresented in this survey sample, compared to the general population.
In future prioritisation exercises the SUVG has fed back that there should be a great effort to ensure people from these communities have their voices heard. With more time and budget, the survey could have been distributed through community organisations and in ways that will help reach these audiences (e.g. a paper version, community engagement).
What do we want stakeholders to do with this information?
We hope that these survey results will help to influence research funding calls and future research, as well as shaping where charities, the government and the health and social care sector need to focus efforts around improving mental health and care.
