Building Knowledge Together: Citizen Science, Communication, and Trust | 5 - 6 October 2026, Berlin

The prevalence of mental health problems among children and adolescents has increased substantially in recent years, while access to evidence-based prevention and early intervention remains limited. Digital approaches offer considerable potential to provide scalable, low-threshold, and flexible support. However, many interventions fail to reflect young people’s lived experiences, which can limit engagement and reduce trust. Participatory approaches that actively involve target groups in knowledge production are therefore key to ensuring that interventions are relevant, trusted, and effectively used.
This contribution presents the development of the Youth Mental Health (YMH) online platform GUSTAPH (www.gustaph.org) as an example of participatory, citizen science-informed innovation in digital mental health prevention. Developed within the German Center for Mental Health (DZPG), GUSTAPH provides accessible, evidence-based psychoeducational content and self-guided interventions for children and adolescents, complemented by tailored material for parents as well as educational and psychological professionals. The platform is designed for integration into everyday contexts such as schools and families, supporting early and autonomous responses to psychological stress.
A central feature of the project is the systematic involvement of children and adolescents as co-creators throughout the development process. Building on principles of Patient and Public Involvement (PPI), young people are actively engaged in needs assessments, prioritization processes, and iterative feedback loops. At the same time, parents as well as educational and psychological professionals (e.g., teachers, school staff, and school psychologists) are included as additional stakeholders to ensure contextual relevance and feasibility in real-world settings. For example, participatory data (e.g., N = 730 adolescents) from a participatory school survey identified key needs related to school stress, emotional challenges, and accessible mental health information, directly shaping the platform’s modular structure and content.
In this approach, young people are positioned as experts of their own lived experiences. This is particularly relevant in the context of mental health, where stigma and barriers to help-seeking persist. Co-creation is expected to strengthen trust in both the platform and the communicated content, thereby facilitating engagement, acceptance, and ultimately the effectiveness of preventive interventions.
The project is complemented by the project BE-WELL (starting mid-2026), a participatory initiative to develop a digital school-based monitoring system that captures students’ well-being and visualizes aggregated data via dashboards for educational professionals. Drawing on international data infrastructures (e.g., from Wales), BE-WELL aims to provide actionable insights into risk and protective factors in everyday school life. The dashboards are co-designed with young people and school staff and are intended to inform prevention and early intervention strategies in educational settings.
A key innovation lies in the linkage between BE-WELL and GUSTAPH: while BE-WELL identifies needs and patterns at the group level, GUSTAPH provides directly accessible, evidence-based prevention and intervention options that can be implemented by students, parents, and professionals. This integration illustrates how participatory data infrastructures and co-created communication platforms can jointly support trust-building, knowledge translation, and actionable mental health promotion.
Overall, GUSTAPH demonstrates how participatory approaches in digital mental health development can enhance relevance, trust, and communication. By linking participatory monitoring and intervention systems, it highlights the potential of co-created digital ecosystems to bridge research, practice, and lived experience in preventive mental health care.