Youth mental health and technology
About our research
With 75% of all mental illness manifesting before the age of 25, there is a great need to change the way in which clinical care is delivered to young people with emerging mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, other mood disorders and psychosis. Specialised clinical assessment is required as well as effective psychosocial services. Young people need access to models of care customised to reflect their unique, individual needs.
The Youth Mental Health and Technology Team, led by Professor Ian Hickie, puts young people at the centre of their own care. We partner with health services to develop innovative treatments for those aged 12-25 with emerging mental health disorders.
Our extensive collaborations with health service providers, industry, government, philanthropic and research organisations enable us to quickly and effectively translate our research findings into large-scale health system innovations and mental health policy reform, facilitating continuous improvements to mental health services for the benefit of young people in Australia.
Lived Experience
The Youth Mental Health and Technology team at the Brain and Mind Centre adopts a research strategy in which lived experience is embedded as a foundational principle across all programs of work by:
- Embedding salaried lived experience researchers as core members of the research team
- Establishing governance and advocacy roles, including the Lived Experience Working Group (LEWG) and Right Care, First Time, Where You Live National Youth Reference Group, which ensures diverse perspectives guide our work.
- Implementing structured co-design processes to ensure research protocols, tools, interventions and knowledge translation activities are appropriate, culturally responsive, and meaningful to young people.
- Ensuring safe, accessible, and youth-friendly research environments, including the provision of sensory accommodations, flexible participation options, and paid engagement.
- Capacity building through mentorship, authorship opportunities, and leadership development for young people involved in research.
This embedded model is informed by our ongoing partnerships with young people and their families and continually refined through collaborative practice. It aims to strengthen best practice by ensuring that lived experience meaningfully informs and contributes to a broader framework for embedding lived experience voices in youth mental health research.
Current research projects
We are developing next generation clinical and systems-based decision support tools, utilising participatory systems modelling approaches. We harness data science methods and innovation from across disciplines in order to achieve advances in the mental health and mental wealth of young people. |
Research programs
- Right Care, First Time, Where You Live (BHP Foundation): Place-based, inclusive mental healthcare design empowers communities to respond to and predict the needs of their young people. A partnership to see young people back to school, back to work, and thriving in their communities.
Research lead
A/Prof Jo-Ann Occhipinti
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 and affordability of mental health care, ensuring more young people can access and benefit from timely, high-quality, evidence-based treatments.
- 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.
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.
- Innowell: Innowell 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: We are building 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 psychoeducational self-management content based on evidence-based strategies for mental health.
- 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.
Research leads
Developed following more than 10 years of research by our team, the BMC Youth Model 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 prevent progression to more complex and severe forms of illness, and change trajectories for young people.
Research programs
- This model of care has been translated into a deployable education and training package, and is most effective when coupled and implemented with digital technology. The training package is endorsed as a Continuing Professional Development activity for psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health nurses, social workers, and occupational therapists. For more information, visit our Engagement Hub site.
- Design and implementation of clinical care models (Philanthropic family foundation donors): The Brain and Mind Centre Youth Model is underpinned by longitudinal tracking and characterisation of large cohorts of young people. This has enabled us to optimise and develop evidence-based, innovative models of care for the treatment of youth anxiety, depression and other youth mental health issues.
- Youth Workshops: To make the Youth Model more accessible to young people, our team has developed and is evaluating a lived experience-led–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.
Research leads
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), University of Queensland, 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 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 phenotyping 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.
- 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.
Our research programs
- Neurobiology Youth Follow-Up Study: This is large, 3-year 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.
- MELODY trial: MELODY is a Wellcome Trust funded randomised controlled trial testing whether exogenous 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Research leads
Dr Jacob Crouse, A/Prof Elizabeth Scott
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
Key publications
Combine economic, social and medical data to forecast need and design services to address the growing crisis.
Authors: Jo-An Occhipinti , Adam Skinner , P. Murali Doraiswamy , Cameron Fox , Helen Herrman , Shekhar Saxena , Elisha London , Yun Ju Christine Song & Ian B. Hickie
26 September, 2021
Paul Crosland, Nicholas Ho, Syed Hossein Hosseini, Catherine Vacher, Adam Skinner, Andrea N. Natsky, Sebastian Rosenberg, Raphael Hasudungan, Sam Huntley, Yun Ju Christine Song, Grace Yeeun Lee, Deborah A. Marshall, Jo-An Occhipinti,* Ian B. Hickie.* (*joint senior authors) – Cost effectiveness of eight system-level strategies for enhancing the mental health of young people using system dynamics modelling and simulation. Lancet Psychiatry, 11(2), 123–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(23)00396-6
Louise Freebairn, Jo-An Occhipinti, Samantha Huntley, Yun Ju C Song, Grace Yeeun Lee, Adam Skinner, Samuel Hockey, Kenny Lawson, Ian B. Hickie. Participatory methods for systems modelling of youth mental health: An implementation protocol. JIMR Research Protocols 2022: 7(11): e32988. doi: 10.2196/32988.
Adam Skinner, Nathaniel Osgood, Jo-An Occhipinti, Yun Ju Christine Song, Ian B. Hickie. Unemployment and underemployment are causes of suicide. Science Advances, July 12, 2023: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg3758
Authors: Ian B Hickie, Tracey A Davenport, Jane M Burns, Alyssa C Milton, Laura Ospina‐Pinillos, Lisa Whittle, Cristina S Ricci, Larisa T McLoughlin, John Mendoza Shane P Cross, Sarah E Piper, Frank Iorfino, Haley M LaMonica
Date: 06 October 2019
Authors: Frank Iorfino, Elizabeth M. Scott, Joanne S. Carpenter, Shane P. Cross, Daniel F. Hermens, Madhura Killedar, Alissa Nichles, Natalia Zmicerevska, Django White, Adam J. Guastella, Jan Scott, Patrick D. McGorry, Ian B. Hickie.
Date: August, 2019
Authors: Jo-An Atkinson, Andrew Page, Mark Heffernan, Geoff McDonnell, Ante Prodan, Bill Campos, Graham Meadows, Ian B Hickie.
Date: December 2018
Authors: Joanne S. Carpenter, Rébecca Robillard, Daniel F. Hermens, Sharon L. Naismith, Christopher Gordon, Elizabeth M. Scott, Ian B. Hickie
Date: January 2017
Authors: Brittany L. Mitchell, Adrian I. Campos, Miguel E. Rentería, Richard Parker, Lenore Sullivan, Kerrie McAloney, Baptiste Couvy-Duchesne, Sarah E. Medland, Nathan A. Gillespie, Jan Scott, Brendan P. Zietsch, Penelope A. Lind, Nicholas G. Martin and Ian B. Hickie.
Date: June 2019
Authors: Haley M LaMonica, Frank Iorfino, Grace Yeeun Lee, Sarah Piper, Jo-An Occhipinti, Tracey A Davenport, Shane Cross, Alyssa Milton, Laura Ospina-Pinillos, Lisa Whittle, Shelley C Rowe, Mitchell Dowling, Elizabeth Stewart, Antonia Ottavio, Samuel Hockey, Vanessa Wan Sze Cheng, Jane Burns, Elizabeth M Scott, Ian B Hickie.
Date: March 2022
Authors: Aila Naderbagi, Victoria Loblay, Iqthyer Uddin Md Zahed, Mahalakshmi Ekambareshwar, Adam Poulsen, Yun J C Song, Laura Ospina-Pinillos, Michael Krausz, Mostafa Mamdouh Kamel, Ian B Hickie, Haley M LaMonica
Date: July 2024
Authors: Haley M LaMonica, Jacob J Crouse, Yun J C Song, Mafruha Alam, Mahalakshmi Ekambareswhar, Victoria Loblay, Adam Yoon, Grace Cha, Chloe Wilson, Madelaine Sweeney-Nash, Nathanael Foo, Melissa Teo, Mikael Perhirin, Jakelin Troy, Ian B Hickie.
Date: October 2022
Our Team
- Professor Ian Hickie | NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow and Co-Director, Health and Policy, Brain and Mind Centre
- Dr Christine Song | Research Operations Manager
- Jacqueline Hutcheon | Executive Assistant to Professor Ian Hickie
Research teams
- Associate Professor Jo-An Occhipinti | Head, Systems Modeling, Simulation & Data Science; Youth Mental Health and Technology; Co-Director, Mental Wealth Initiative, Brain and Mind Centre
- Nicholas Ho | Senior Data Scientist
- Samuel McLeod | Data Scientist
- Dr Catherine Vacher | Evaluation Systems Modeller
- Dr Adam Skinner | Senior Research Fellow
- Emily Selmon | Dissemination & Engagement Manager
- Kristen Tran | Mental Wealth Initiative Postdoctoral Research Associate
- Sam Huntley | Implementation & Engagement Manager
- Paul Crosland | Senior Research Fellow
- Dr Hossein Hosseini | Systems Modelling Research Fellow
- Josephine Brogden | Digital Navigator & Lived Experience Researcher
- Sarah Piper | Senior Clinical Research Officer
- Alexis Hutcheon | Lived Experience Researcher & Digital Navigator
- Alexis Hutcheon | Lived Experience Researcher
- Samuel Hockey | Lived Experience Researcher
- Josephine Brogden | Digital Navigator & Lived Experience Researcher
- Carla Gorban | Digital Navigator & Lived Experience Researcher
- Zsofi de Haan | Lived Experience Researcher PhD Candidate
- Dr Frank Iorfino | Senior Research Fellow, Lead
- A/Professor Haley LaMonica, Lead
- Matthew Varidel | Senior Research Data Scientist
- William Capon | Research Officer
- Dr Ashlee Turner | Senior Research Officer
- Dr Adam Poulsen | Research Fellow
- Victor An | Data Scientist
- Alison Crowley | Implementation Officer
- Min Chong | Research Assistant
- Carla Gorban | Digital Navigator and Lived Experience Researcher
- Dr Jacob Crouse | Research Fellow
- Associate Professor Elizabeth Scott | Principal Research Fellow
- Dr Shin Ho Park | Research Data Scientist
- Alissa Nichles | Senior Clinical Research Officer|
- Natalia Zmicerevska | Senior Clinical Research Officer
- Minji Park | Research Assistant
- Dr Joanne Carpenter | Research Associate
- Mirim Shin | Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Neurobiology
- Connie Janiszewski | Research Assistant
- Nathan Bradshaw | Project Manager
- Elizabeth Phung | Research Assistant
- Emiliana Tonini | Sleep & Mental Health Postdoctoral Research Associate
- Hannah You | Research Nurse
- Elie Jeon | Clinical Research Manager
- Dr Sarah McKenna | Research Fellow
- Paul Crosland
- Alexander Bradley Tavevski-Beckwith
- Mujahid Torwali
- William Capon
- Zsofi de Haan