Updated on 30 April 2025
Introduction
We are a charity that uses digital innovation, data-driven analysis and the experience of clinical experts to improve the mental health of the UK population through the provision of digital tools, support and resources. We provide early intervention, preventative care, and crisis support through our digital services. Shout is the UK’s only free, 24/7 text message support service, while The Mix offers free, anonymous online advice on key issues affecting young people. We also work to empower young people as service co-creators and volunteers, equipping them with mental health skills they can apply in their communities and workplaces.
Mental Health Innovations (MHI) is a data-driven organisation. We are passionate about using data for good, and data insights sit at the heart of our day-to-day activities and future strategic plans. We use data to monitor and enhance our services, to identify opportunities to develop new resources and services, and to generate mental health insights of interest to others, including the wider sector, government, our service users, and the general public. We also collaborate with academic partners and policymakers to maximise the impact of these insights on mental health. While we are not producers of official statistics, we voluntarily comply with the Code of Practice for Statistics to ensure our insights are trustworthy, of suitable quality, and of public value (the Code of Practice for Statistics is a set of standards produced by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), which provides independent regulation of all official statistics produced in the UK).
Trustworthiness
At MHI, trust is at the core of how we manage data, operate our services, and engage with our service users. As a charity dedicated to digital mental health support, we are committed to ensuring that the data we collect is handled responsibly, securely, and always in the best interests of those we serve.
To produce our statistics, we operate within a highly secure cloud infrastructure, partnering with Cloudwick to implement industry-leading encryption, access controls, and risk mitigation. Our ISO 27001-certified Information Security Management System (ISMS) ensures that we systematically assess and manage security risks to the highest international standards. Regular external audits and collaboration with security experts enable us to continuously refine our approach.
Transparency and trustworthiness are central to our operations. Our data collection is GDPR compliant, with users clearly informed about how their data is used (as, for example, outlined in our Shout User Privacy Notice), and subsequently effectively anonymised for data analytics. We also have a dedicated Data Protection Officer, a specialist security team, and a team of highly skilled data experts from varying technical and analytical backgrounds. Our data professionals additionally undergo a breadth of training, including data protection, security awareness, and many have also opted to complete the Shout Volunteer training course. This blend of training helps to enrich their understanding of the data while ensuring that it is always handled in a secure way.
Trustworthiness also played a significant role in our merger with The Mix, which was finalised in September 2024. As part of this process, we conducted a thorough GDPR compliance and data evaluation review before integrating their diverse datasets into our cloud environment. This stringent process helped ensure that privacy and security requirements were met to the highest standards. We further drew on this principle when harmonising these data, to create one of the most comprehensive datasets on the mental health of young people in the UK.
Alongside strict data governance, integrity and impartiality are central to all the insights that we generate, ensuring that our analyses are free from commercial, political, or personal bias. For example, while we work with corporate partners to generate insights on the interactions of users with our services, we operate under clear guidelines that define the nature and scope of the insights produced. In our work with policy makers, we also remain an independent provider of statistics and do not engage in lobbying activities. Additionally, our data professionals are trained to approach data objectively and we integrate data practices to enforce this, such as one-on-one and group discussions around statistical plans and critical review of data analyses.
We are committed to releasing our statistics in an open and transparent manner that promotes public confidence. In the spirit of the orderly release principle, we release our statistics on a timely basis and at intervals that meet the needs of stakeholders as far as possible. We do not follow all aspects of the orderly release principle (many of which are primarily designed for producers of official government statistics), such pre-announcing release dates and times for publicly available reports, but we are considering how to integrate these into our processes to help promote stakeholder confidence.
By embedding trust, security, transparency, and impartiality across every facet of our operations, we ensure that our data-driven insights not only drive innovation in digital mental health support but also consistently uphold the highest standards of integrity, reliability, and public trust.
Quality
We ensure that both the data we collect and insights we generate are of high quality, especially as they serve a wide audience — from the public to policymakers. By collecting data in near real time, we produce current, relevant, and responsive insights into emerging mental health challenges. Through Shout alone, we process nearly 2,000 text conversations daily, capturing a vast, anonymised, and structured dataset for analysis.
Our team employs robust methods and automation wherever possible, underpinned by rigorous quality assurance processes and continuous improvement cycles. Every data analysis project we undertake is also driven by a clear, mission-aligned purpose. We carefully assess the necessity and potential impact of each project to ensure it addresses genuine needs and meaningfully contributes to service improvement, product development, and advancements in the wider sector. Our data scientists leverage the best available methods—including the latest machine learning techniques—and maintain full transparency about their methodological choices. We adhere to industry best practices for documentation by tracking tasks in Atlassian’s Jira, maintaining our code on GitHub, and summarising our work (including choice of statistical approach) in Confluence. We also recognise that our data has limitations, and we are currently working to enhance how we communicate those limitations alongside our statistics. This comprehensive, transparent, and purpose-driven approach ensures that our data and statistics are quality assured and robust.
Our merger with The Mix in late 2024 further enhanced our data quality assurance practices. We leveraged the Trustworthiness, Quality, and Value (TQV) framework during the harmonisation of our datasets, including a thorough evaluation of data quality. As we standardised labels across our diverse datasets—such as the topics discussed during interactions with a Shout Volunteer or a counsellor provided by The Mix—we established a process to track all changes and decisions, ensuring full transparency. Additionally, we implemented rigorous automated pipelines, to enhance the quality of our statistics, leading to the creation of one of the largest mental health datasets in the UK. In parallel with merging data, we consolidated our data teams and established overarching Data and AI ethics principles in line with the Code of Practice, ensuring consistency, robustness, and methodological alignment. Regular knowledge-sharing sessions have deepened our understanding of each dataset’s strengths and limitations, and this collaboration has already resulted in a recent report that highlighted critical trends and reinforced the need for accessible digital mental health support.
With a unified data ecosystem and shared commitment to TQV, we are well positioned to drive innovation in the mental health space. Through data and best practices established during the merger, we have launched dedicated services aimed at younger people, including peer-to-peer counselling and self-paced learning. By applying TQV principles and youth co-design to the development of our services, we ensure innovation is rooted in integrity, backed by high quality evidence, and responsive to the evolving needs of young people.
Beyond internal validation, we collaborate with leading academic institutions to ensure our data and description of statistics meet scientific and peer-reviewed standards. These partnerships not only enhance the robustness of our statistical methods but also improve the efficiency with which insights are derived from our data. For example, our long-standing collaboration with the Institute for Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London has enabled us to produce comprehensive reports that inform policy and best practices in digital mental health.
Value
We are committed to transforming insights into actionable, high quality evidence. Through annual reports, research publications, and blog posts, we make our findings accessible and impactful. By adhering to stringent data collection, analysis, and reporting practices, we ensure that our insights are timely, reliable, and capable of driving real-world change in youth mental health support and policy. We are dedicated to ensuring our insights provide real-world impact by shaping our services, enhancing public understanding and informing policymakers. Resource constraints often limit the degree to which we can provide greater levels of detail about our statistics (or the level at which some users may find them useful), but as we develop our processes we are continually working with stakeholders to improve that aspect of our outputs.
A key part of our approach involves lived experience consultation and co-design. Many of our services, including one-to-one counselling and peer-to-peer discussion forums, have been co-developed with young people, ensuring that the support we provide is accessible, relevant, and responsive to their needs. By working directly with service users, we identify new opportunities for innovation and continuously refine our approach to digital mental health support and our data analyses.
Beyond service development, we strive for our insights to have as wide reach as possible. To meet this objective, we regularly publish accessible reports, blog posts, and research findings that translate complex data into clear, actionable evidence. These reports are designed to be engaging and practical, ensuring that policymakers, charities and the public can use them to inform their decisions about their mental health. Our active presence on social media and other digital platforms allows us to engage widely with the public, raising awareness of key mental health issues and ensuring our findings have the broadest possible impact. We also engage with our stakeholders to ensure that our insights continue to meet their needs and to maximise the value of the statistics we generate. This includes, for example, membership of the DHSC's National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group.
Our insights have directly contributed to policy discussions and national mental health strategies, including roundtable discussions on the role of AI in digital mental health support and government’s strategy for suicide prevention. Our collaborations with the Institute of Global Health (IGHI) at Imperial College London and other leading institutions further widened the reach of our findings. Our report, co-written with the IGHI, highlights how digital services like Shout can help address the growing demand for urgent mental health support in the UK. The launch of this report was widely attended by key mental health stakeholders.
Through the ongoing application of these principles, and regular review of their implementation, we will be working to continually enhance existing and new data work. By ensuring that our insights are widely accessible, actively shared, and embedded into service development and policy, MHI transforms data into meaningful change. Our work ensures that mental health needs of the nation—including children and young people— remain at the forefront, helping to create a more informed, responsive, and effective support system across the UK.