Developing an E-Mental Health Detection Tool for Early-Stage Psychosis in the Community

Our vision is to extend the benefits of early interventions for young people with emerging psychosis (1), including those with a Clinical High Risk state for Psychosis (CHR-P) (3) and those with a First-Episode of Psychosis (FEP), to the wider community.

This is because currently only a minority of young people have access to specialized services (2) and as a result, emerging psychosis is only detected at later stages (4). To achieve this vision, we will develop a novel E-Mental Health detection tool.

While some risk estimation models are available to improve the detection of CHR-P and FEP individuals, these models tend to be complex and their scalability is limited. We believe that to improve the detection of emerging psychosis at scale, a cheap and simple detection tool is needed. We feel that digital tools could critically address this issue.

We expect that this funding will provide a potentially ground-breaking approach towards better identifying young people with emerging psychosis in the community through the use of E-Mental Health.

In our view, this approach could also pave the way for widespread use of E-Mental Health applications for an improved detection of emerging mental disorders beyond the psychosis field.