"Remote mental health interventions for young people A rapid review of the evidence"

 - Dr Karen James, Youth Access July 2020

A valuable, "rapid review" from Youth Access supporting the value of access to online therapy for young people.
This review has limitations - acknowledged in the review itself- as it was carried out in response to COVID-19.

Aim - 
"Our aim was to summarise current evidence of the impact and implementation of remote interventions to support young people’s mental health. Remote interventions include any form of support that is not delivered in person (e.g. telephone or video calls, online chat messaging or forums, text messages or emails). To make sure we were generating knowledge that was most useful for our member organisations we only included remote support that was delivered by a counsellor, or other practitioner, meaning this review does not cover app-based or computerized interventions"

Conclusions - 
"There were very few robust evaluations of remote support,however those included in our review suggest it can lead to improvements in young people’s mental health and wellbeing.
There were examples of how these interventions can allow services to work flexibly and adapt their ways of communication to fit the needs of the young person. In this sense remote interventions, when offered alongside face to-face support, can help to build a service that is truly young person-centred.

However our findings suggest that using remote options as a replacement for face-to-face support (as was necessary during the Covid-19 pandemic) is problematic. Remote interventions were typically described as ‘brief’, meaning sessions were largely focused on providing space for the young person to tell their story and practitioners often did not have time to identify action plans or goals. 

It may be useful for services to consider how their approach could be adapted to provide the most impact over a small number of sessions. Some training around how practitioners can increase engagement might also be useful. Remote support requires staff to re-think their ways of working and identity. This may be less of an issue following the pandemic, however, could still be a challenge for newly qualified practitioners, or those who were furloughed. 

There was also evidence that staff can remain resistant to providing remote support in services that had adopted these approaches, even when they worked well and were popular amongst young people. In these cases training around the strengths of remote support, and the experiences of young people may be helpful. This should also be included in undergraduate and entry level training for mental health practitioners."

My personal thoughts on these conclusions is that these findings might have been different had these practitioners had training in working remotely to provide the information and experience required that allows for a trusting and safe online therapeutic relationship. 

Link to rapid review