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 (grant REG-19-026), set out to co-design a youth-facing platform through direct participation of the target users.

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 (median age 23, 63% women) testing both the resulting web platform, Youth Collective Minds (Mentes Colectivas para Jóvenes, YMC), and a companion smartphone app, Mental Beat. YMC combines psychoeducational resources, an avatar-based interface and an optional telecounseling service to support self-management and help-seeking.

In the feasibility study, YMC's beta prototype scored 72.86 on the System Usability Scale (SUS) and a Net Promoter Score of 2.85; 83% of testers (29/35) said they would reuse it. Psychoeducational resources were the most-used feature (100%) and avatars the second most used (77%), while telecounseling was the least used (8.6%), with technical issues cited as a barrier to engagement. In a subsequent naturalistic trial (July 2022-October 2023) of 435 users (314 registered, 121 anonymous; 70.5% female, median age 18), the platform's beta version scored 85.0 on the SUS and 63.7% of registered users (61.2% of anonymous 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% (27/102) completed it.

The research team published the low first-day return rate and low telecounseling-completion figures alongside the usability scores, and both papers (JMIR Human Factors, May 2025; JMIR Formative Research, December 2025) frame post-launch engagement as the platform's main unresolved challenge for future iterations.

Read the full analysis: https://medicina.javeriana.edu.co/departamento-psiquiatria-salud-mental/