Grant: Operation:eHealth Innov Partnership Program(eHIPP)-Youth &Adolescent Mental Hlth

The prevalence of diagnosable mental illnesses is increasing on North American university campuses. Meanwhile the Canadian health care system faces serious challenges that include long wait-times for mental health care. This is of particular concern for youth entering post-secondary education under an economic downturn, affected by financial stressors and insecure futures. These stressors are often amplified for youth from vulnerable communities. The aim of our project is to support the mental health of campus students through ehealth solutions, which prove attractive and are beneficial, from an evidence-based perspective. We propose to develop a Mindfulness Virtual Community (MVC) with key elements of mindfulness-based self-help modules, online group meetings (student-to-student and student-to-professional), and mental health education. We plan to conduct a randomized controlled trial by recruiting students over three semesters at York University (n =600) into three arms: two-week MVC, 8-week group-based mindfulness and wait-list control groups. We hypothesize that MVC and group-based mindfulness groups will be similar in terms of improvements in the mental health symptoms and the care experience but the former will be less costly. More importantly, compared to the waitlist group, the MVC group will have significant improvements in mental health symptoms and the care experience along with projected economic impact. We plan to conduct post-trial qualitative interviews with the MVC participants along with qualitative content analysis of the virtual community discussion forum. All phases of the project will actively engage the healthcare innovation community (researchers, clinicians, students, and decision-makers) and partnering organizations including ForaHealthyMe, IT partner with tools at TRL 6/7 levels. The ultimate goal is to help students adopt mental health-promoting behaviours that reduce their needs to access psychiatric and/or clinical counselling service.