Verbal Wellbeing: A Digital Mental Health App for Improving Wellbeing in Children (23Jun23)

Presented at the International Digital Mental Health and Wellbeing Conference at Ulster University by Dr Natalie Divin, Research Associate in Psychology at Verbal.

Background

The first theme of the Northern Ireland Mental Health Strategy 2021-2031 is to promote mental wellbeing, resilience, and good mental health across society. This theme is important in the context of children and young people, who are experiencing delays in receiving mental health care and who lack access to mental health professionals in primary schools.

Verbal’s Previous Work

The Verbal Arts Centre has delivered a range of 12-24 week bibliotherapy-based programmes in primary schools that have significantly improved resilience and wellbeing. These programmes have also received feedback from children who have requested more bibliotherapy-based programmes in their schools. However, the reach of these programmes has been limited by factors such as scheduling with schools, the receipt of external funding, and arranging session delivery with volunteers and facilitators.

Verbal Wellbeing

To address these limitations, to provide more wellbeing programmes to children, and to expand the reach of our wellbeing programmes, the Verbal Wellbeing app was developed. This user-friendly app contains curriculums designed to improve mental wellbeing for children aged 4-11 years, containing both group and individual sessions for children who require extra assistance. Curriculums were designed in collaboration with psychologists, literature specialists and parents, and were informed by the Education Authority's Personal Development and Mutual Understanding guidelines. Each curriculum includes stories related to the session's theme, psychology-informed annotations to prompt discussion and reflection, illustrations to focus attention, and activity sheets that reinforce mental health toolkits used in the session's story. The app was designed for teacher use to provide their classrooms with mental health resources and to facilitate discussions around challenging topics such as bullying. The app also contains mood-tracking functionality for teachers to track the wellbeing and progress of their class. Our aim with the Verbal Wellbeing app is to provide accessible, evidence-based mental health curriculums to schools during a time of school budget cuts, with these curriculums continuing to expand to 2024 and beyond.  Read the full update here.