Our mission

We are dedicated to developing digital mental health technologies that deliver personalised and measurement-based care to young people experiencing mental ill health. By harnessing technology, we aim to increase access to specialised mental health care and empower young people and their families to work alongside clinicians in shared decision-making.

Our focus

• Transforming health systems and services: We innovate within health systems to optimise both the quality, accessibility, appropriateness, and affordability of mental health care, ensuring more young people can access and benefit from timely, high-quality, evidence-based treatments aligned with their needs and preferences.
• Personalising care: We design technologies that tailor care to individual needs, informed by a deep understanding of the onset and course of major mental health conditions—such as bipolar disorder and depression—and associated outcomes, including functional impairment and suicidality.

Our approach

• Data science and computational modelling: We leverage data science and complex systems methodologies to develop predictive and causal models. Our focus is on understanding the onset and course of illness to guide indicated prevention and early interventions.
• Co-design: We engage in continuous codesign and user testing with individuals with lived experience, their families, and service providers. This collaboration ensures that our discoveries are transformed into practical, user-friendly digital tools. 
• Implementation and evaluation: We rigorously test and refine our tools based on learnings from implementation in real-world settings. Evaluation ensures that our solutions are effective, sustainable, and aligned with the needs of young people and their support networks.

Research Leads:

 A/Prof Frank Iorfino, A/Prof Haley LaMonica

Our research programs:

• EMPOWERED trial (NHMRC):A large-scale, multi-site, health services randomised control trial of personalised and measurement-based care, supported by digital technology. This is a major clinical trial testing a new model of youth mental health care that leverages digital technologies and new service roles (digital navigator and clinical facilitator).
• Mental health Intelligence Agent (Mia): Mia is an agentic-AI that leverages expert-level mental health knowledge and reasoning to enhance workforce capabilities. From initial assessment to managing personalised care plans, Mia provides ongoing specialised support to the workforce, enabling more efficient and effective care. Mia also acts as a mental health guide for young people, supporting them to identify appropriate clinical and self-care options tailored to their individual needs. By enabling young people to monitor their progress over time, Mia helps them understand which approaches are most effective for them and why.
• Right Care, First Time, Where You Live (BHP Foundation): Place-based, inclusive mental health care design empowers communities to respond to and predict the needs of their young people. The aim of this partnership is to see young people back to school, back to work, and thriving in their communities.
• Innowell:This is an established digital mental health platform we designed to deliver personalised, measurement-based mental health care in clinical services. Led by our research team, it was developed and evaluated over seven years with clinicians, technologists, and those with lived experience. It has been implemented and scaled to services internationally and has over 40 real-world studies about its development and use. We continue to work on the research and development of this platform to improve its utility and impact.
• Minding your mind: As a result of more than 10 years of research by our team, the BMC Youth Model (now called Minding Your Mind) has been developed which promotes an enhanced youth mental health model of care. It incorporates evidence-based processes, including measurement-based care and routine outcome monitoring. This model explicitly aims to change trajectories for young people, preventing progression to more complex forms of illness.
  • This model also underpins many of our digital innovations, including clinical decision-support systems, personalised care pathways, and technologies that help young people and clinicians work together in shared decision making.
• MYM Workshops: To make the Youth Model more accessible to young people, our team has developed and is evaluating a lived experience–led workshop. This interactive session introduces the key components of the model—multi-dimensional assessment, clinical staging, outcome monitoring, and shared decision-making—through relatable examples, co-designed tools, and optional digital resources. The workshops aim to support young people to feel more empowered, informed, and confident to engage in their own mental health care.
• MYM app: We’ve built a free and publicly available mobile application – i.e., Minding Your Mind. It has been designed to help young people track their mental health and behaviour to better understand their own mental health symptoms. It features monitoring capabilities (through short daily surveys or passive integrations), and data visualisation of key variables related to mental health, including sleep, activity, and exercise. Minding Your Mind also provides content based on evidence-based strategies for mental health to help young people self-managed their own health and wellbeing.
• Causal AI Recommendation System (CAIRS): CAIRS is a digital tool that applies causal artificial intelligence within a Bayesian decision framework to recommend targeted mental health interventions. By integrating a person’s current mental health data with dynamic relationships between domains (using structural causal modelling), CAIRS provides personalised, evidence-based recommendations tailored to individual needs.
• Computational psychiatry:  We use complex systems, prediction, and causal modelling to understand the course of disorders in youth, revealing critical mechanisms and potential intervention points. By integrating these computational insights with clinical and neuroscientific data, we aim to develop novel treatment targets and approaches that improve outcomes for young people.

We are dedicated to transforming our understanding of the causal, pathophysiological mechanisms and major pathways leading to mood disorders in young people, as well as developing and testing novel strategies to improve their clinical (mental and physical) and functional outcomes. By studying a broad spectrum of clinical, behavioural, biological, and medical measures as young people move through development and clinical care, we aim to uncover clinical subtypes, pathways, and treatment targets that can transform the way we prevent and manage mental health conditions in young people. We collaborate with leaders in genetics, clinical mental health, circadian biology, wearables, molecular diagnostics, and neurobiology from University of Oxford (UK), National Institute of Mental Health (US), Newcastle University (UK), University of California San Diego (US), Aarhus University (Denmark), University of Queensland, Monash University, Flinders University, and QIMR Berghofer.

Our focus and approach:

• Clinical trials: We test the efficacy and mechanisms of sleep and circadian targeted treatments (e.g., melatonin, digital cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia) and digitally-enhanced, highly-personalised and measurement-based care (HP&MBC) packages, which we hope will result in novel treatment options for youth with mood disorders, and which may uncover novel treatment-relevant subtypes for new stratified treatment approaches.
• Multi-modal clinical cohorts: In collaboration with long-term clinical partners (e.g., Mind Plasticity, headspace Camperdown) we track large groups of young people with diverse presentations of mental health conditions and use repeated measurement of genetic risk, sleep-wake cycles and circadian rhythms, mental health phenomenology, and cognitive function (among other variables) to study the trajectories of young people over several years as they engage with clinical mental health care. The goal of this work is to enhance our knowledge about the drivers of clinical and functional outcomes of young people, with the ultimate aim of identifying new intervention targets.
• Genetically-informative community-based cohorts: In collaboration with Australian and international partners we study multiple community-based, longitudinal, genetically-informative studies of children and young people in the peak developmental phase of risk for major mood disorders (ages ~12-25), as well as genetically-informative cohorts with established depressive and bipolar disorders, wherein we examine the etiology, pathways, and clinical and functional outcomes of people with mental disorders, across the lifespan.

Research leads:

Dr Jacob Crouse, A/Prof Elizabeth Scott

Our research programs:

1. Neurobiology Youth Follow-Up Study: This is a large clinical cohort study combining a range of multidimensional outcome measures (e.g., social and occupational functioning, alcohol and substance misuse, clinical stage) with multi-modal measurement of sleep-wake cycles and circadian rhythms, neurocognitive function, and genetic risk (among others), which are repeated at 6-month, 1-year, 2-year, and 3-year follow-ups. The overarching objectives of the Neurobiology Youth Follow-Up Study are to identify the drivers of illness progression and functional impairment, investigate pathophysiological subtypes and treatment-relevant subtypes, build and test predictive and computational models, and explore the mechanisms of response to specific psychological, behavioural, and medical treatments.
2. MELODY trial: MELODY is a Wellcome Trust funded randomised controlled trial testing whether oral melatonin and digital cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (dCBT-I) are effective antidepressant strategies for young adults with depressive or bipolar mood disorders. Additionally, other aims are to test whether correction of circadian dysfunction is a mechanism of any antidepressant treatment effects, and whether there are treatment-relevant subgroups that may guide future stratified treatment approaches.
3. Australian Genetics of Depression Study (AGDS): AGDS is a nationwide, genetically-informative study of over 20,000 Australians with depression. The key aims of our work on AGDS are to study the etiology of depression (with a major focus on the contribution of sleep and circadian disturbances), predictors of treatment response, and longitudinal trajectories across the lifespan.
4. Brisbane Longitudinal Twin Study (BLTS): BLTS is a prospective, longitudinal, genetically-informative study of twins and siblings spanning childhood to young adulthood. The key aims of our work on BLTS is to examine the etiology and illness pathways to mental disorders and impairment across a key phase of developmental risk.
5. Novel circadian and immune markers: As part of an NHMRC Synergy Grant, we are working with partners in nanotechnology, circadian biology, genetics, and omics to develop and evaluate novel methods of measuring and tracking circadian and immune disturbances in young people with mental ill-health.

Innovations in mental health care need strong policy support.  Successful implementation of change is difficult, especially in systems as complex as mental health care. 

The Mental Health Policy stream of our work aims to facilitate this implementation, focusing on supporting effective policymaking to develop healthier, wealthier and more equitable communities.

Mental health spans medical, clinical and psychosocial aspects in healthcare, as well as drawing on other key areas of concern to young people, like education, employment, housing and social connection.  Our research explores this broader ‘ecosystem’, aiming to help guide investment towards best value policies and models of care.

To achieve this goal, we take an inter-disciplinary research approach from public policy, economics, system science and implementation science. Our goal is to better understand the systemic drivers of mental health, developing a ‘societal economic perspective’ to assess policy investments (health, economic, and economic impacts), and a ‘place-based implementation’ approach that supports the development of best-value and equitable policy investments, tailored for local implementation.

A critical element of this work is in relation to accountability, developing the technology or processes by which our mental health system can better understand the impact it has on people’s lives and how it can improve.

We focus on three key questions:

• ‘What to do?’ -The allocation of resources to the best value policies
• ‘How to do it better?’ Identifying more efficient models of implementation, and;
• ‘For whom?’ Considering both population-wide and targeted policy interventions, with an emphasis on reducing inequities.

Research leads

 Dr Sebastian Rosenberg, Dr Adam Skinner