Following a competitive application process, NEUROSEC has been successful in securing a grant for a new project to build upon the team’s initial success in ‘Design Bioethics’ with ‘Tracing Tomorrow.’ As part of the British Academy’s ‘Youth Futures’ programme, Dr Gabriela Pavarini and Professor Ilina Singh will lead an international collaboration with research partners and an advisory group of adolescents in Brazil, as well as the chatbot company Talk2U. “Amplifying the Voices of Young People for Sustainable Development in Mental Health” aims to advance understanding of youth agency in mental health and contribute to the achievement of a sustainable and healthy future for Brazilian youth.

To achieve the sustainable development goal of ‘promoting well-being for all’, young people must be engaged in the design of innovative health promotion strategies and in health policy. Yet, it is unclear whether young people feel a sense of agency and responsibility towards mental health improvement in their immediate community and in wider society. Working in close collaboration with an advisory group of adolescents in Brazil, this project’s aims are twofold: (1) to conduct a preliminary mapping of young people’s understandings and aspirations of agency in the context of mental health promotion, and (2) to develop and test a digital tool aimed at assessing and strengthening young people’s sense of agency towards well-being promotion.

More information about the project is available here.