The Leveraging Social Media to Enhance Access to Brief, Evidence-Based, and Low-Cost Mental Health Treatment for LGBTQ+ Adolescents project is a collaboration between Dr. Kathryn Fox of The Fox Lab (University of Denver) and Dr. Jessica Schleider of The Lab for Scalable Mental Health (Stony Brook University).

With support from The Upswing Fund, they created LGBTQ+-affirming mental digital health interventions that are offered online at no cost. Based on Dr. Schleider’s research, demonstrating that “single session interventions,” SSIs, can reduce depression, hopelessness, and anxiety in youth, the two labs collaborated to update these interventions in light of feedback from LGBTQ+ youth.

What makes these digital health interventions unique is that they are free, easily accessible for youth, self-guided and self-paced, and do not require parental consent. Together, these characteristics help minimize traditionally huge barriers for youth to access care. Also unique, these updated interventions intentionally included feedback from LGBTQ+ and QTPOC youth to ensure that they are culturally appropriate and relevant, now including content to help youth understand and combat minority stressors.

The future vision of this work is that SSIs will supplement and sustainably expand traditional mental health care services by increasing access to evidence-based, mental health treatments that can be tailored and widely disseminated across a wide variety of venues (including social media, schools, and after-school programs). In doing so, the two labs aspire to close the gap between those who can, and cannot, access psychological care.

To learn more about their work, and how to support the expansion of these digital health interventions, please contact Kathryn Fox at [email protected] and Jessica Schleider at [email protected].