Youth Collective Minds — Co-Designing a Digital Mental-Health Platform for Bogotá's Youth

Facing high unmet emotional-distress needs among young people in Bogotá and few digital mental-health tools built with Colombian youth rather than for them, the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana's School of Medicine, funded by Fondation Botnar, set out to co-design a youth-facing platform through direct participation of the target users.

The goal was to build a platform — Youth Collective Minds (Mentes Colectivas para Jóvenes, YMC) — combining psychoeducational resources, an avatar-based interface and optional telecounseling to support self-management and help-seeking, shaped directly by young co-designers rather than imposed on them.

Across the design and testing phases, 146 people took part: 110 (75.3%) contributed to developing platform components and 36 (24.7%) took part in usability testing. A related feasibility study ran 19 co-design workshops with 35 further participants, testing both the YMC web platform and a companion smartphone app, Mental Beat.

In the feasibility study, YMC's beta prototype scored 72.86 on the System Usability Scale and a Net Promoter Score of 2.85; 83% of testers said they would reuse it, with psychoeducational resources the most-used feature (100%) and telecounseling the least used (8.6%). In a subsequent naturalistic trial (July 2022–October 2023) of 435 users, the platform's beta version scored 85.0 on the SUS and most users reported clinically relevant emotional distress, but only 18.8% of users returned after their first day, and of those offered telecounseling, just 26.5% completed it.

The research team published the low first-day return rate and low telecounseling-completion figures alongside the favourable usability scores, and both papers frame post-launch engagement as the platform's main unresolved challenge for future iterations.