Who are the young people choosing web-based mental health support? findings from the implementation of australia’s national web-based youth mental health service, eheadspace.
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: The adolescent and early adult years are periods of peak prevalence and incidence for most mental disorders. Despite the rapid expansion of Web-based mental health care, and increasing evidence of its effectiveness, there is little research investigating the characteristics of young people who access Web-based mental health care. headspace, Australia's national youth mental health foundation, is ideally placed to explore differences between young people who seek Web-based mental health care and in-person mental health care as it offers both service modes for young people, and collects corresponding data from each service type. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to provide a comprehensive profile of young people seeking Web-based mental health care through eheadspace (the headspace Web-based counseling platform), and to compare this with the profile of those accessing help in-person through a headspace center. METHODS: Demographic and clinical presentation data were collected from all eheadspace clients aged 12 to 25 years (the headspace target age range) who received their first counseling session between November 1, 2014 and April 30, 2015 via online chat or email (n=3414). These Web-based clients were compared with all headspace clients aged 12 to 25 who received their first center-based counseling service between October 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015 (n=20,015). RESULTS: More eheadspace than headspace center clients were female (78.1% compared with 59.1%), and they tended to be older. A higher percentage of eheadspace clients presented with high or very high levels of psychological distress (86.6% compared with 73.2%), but they were at an earlier stage of illness on other indicators of clinical presentation compared with center clients. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study suggest that eheadspace is reaching a unique client group who may not otherwise seek help or who might wait longer before seeking help if in-person mental health support was their only option. Web-based support can lead young people to seek help at an earlier stage of illness and appears to be an important component in a stepped continuum of mental health care.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Digital interventions could provide support for those who would not seek face-to-face psycho-oncological help.
“In addition, they could provide support for those who would not seek face-to-face psycho-oncological help (14).”
From Mindfulness and skills-based eHealth intervention to reduce distress in cancer-affected patients in the Reduct trial: Intervention protocol of the make it training optimized (2022) · cites this paper as [14]
The Discussion > Conclusions says eheadspace may reach young people who would not otherwise seek help if in-person support were their only option. This supports the proposed role of web-based support, but the paper studies youth mental health services, not psycho-oncological help or people affected by cancer. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 24 · Cited by 66
- Authors
- Rickwood, D., Webb, M., Kennedy, V., & Telford, N.
- Affiliations
- University of Canberra (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Kennedy, Vanessa
- Venue
- JMIR Mental Health
- Publisher
- JMIR Publications Inc.
- Published
- 2016-08-25
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- e40
- ISSN
- 2368-7959 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5016625
- OpenAlex
- W2508077470
- Cited by
- 66
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 11.30
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- JMIR Mental Health (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health Treatment and Access
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Telemedicine and Telehealth Implementation
- Keywords
- youth mental health, adolescents and young adults, help-seeking, online counseling, in-person counseling, psychological distress, help-seeking delay, stepped care, consumer profile
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
