Increasing digital mental health reach and uptake via youth partnerships.

Youth in the United States are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis. Yet, brick-and-mortar mental healthcare, such as face-to-face therapy, is overwhelmingly inaccessible to youth despite research advances in youth mental health. Digital Mental Health tools (DMH), the use of technologies to deliver mental health assessments and interventions, may help to increase mental healthcare accessibility. However, for a variety of reasons, evidence-based DMH have not been successful in reaching youth in real-world settings, particularly those who are most encumbered with access barriers to mental healthcare. This Comment therefore focuses on increasing DMH reach and uptake by young people, particularly among minoritized youth, by engaging in community-based youth partnerships. This idea recognizes and grows from decades worth of community-based participatory research and youth partnerships successfully conducted by other disciplines (e.g., social work, public health, urban planning, education). Increasing uptake and engagement is an issue that is unlikely to be solved by adult-driven theory and design. As such, we emphasize the necessity of reframing youth input into DMH design and deployment from one-time participants to integral community-based partners. Indeed, recognizing and valuing their expertise to equitably address DMH implementation challenges, youth should help to pose the very questions that they will help to answer throughout the design and implementation planning for DMH moving forward

Scoping Review of Waiving Guardian Consent in Child and Pediatric Digital Health Research

The proposed manuscript will systematically review digital mental health interventions with youth that employed a waiver of parental/guardian consent for study participation. The inclusion criteria consist of: 1) containing samples below age 18 that were able to participate with a waiver of parental/guardian consent; 2) examining the intervention and/or assessment of a mental health condition or behavioral health behavior via digital tools; 3) being written in English; and 4) published in a peer-reviewed journal. Findings will be synthesized to propose a needs model, potentially including exclusion pathways to allow for waiving of parental/guardian consent for minor participation in digital mental health research