Teenage Concerns

Teenage Concerns envisions to destigmatize and make mental health accessible for Indian youth with the use of growing ML-AI technologies and connecting distressed anonymously with trained volunteers and medical practitioners.

We are putting forth an anonymous one-to-one thought sharing platform. The plan is to build a well-developed web interface that uses the advanced technologies of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for psychometric tests, in simple words the ‘concern’ tests that help connect the distressed to volunteers and mental health professionals. The organization also proposes to create support groups of volunteers who are trained for distress calls and ready for replies and support. The organization wants to open doors for accessible and affordable mental health professional consultation for a common man by creating intensive networking of psychiatrists and psychologists through such technologies. We also intend to use the diverse field of data science to predict best solutions and choices for connecting the distressed to the right person. By creating such networking, we also want to promote mental health care among the young population at present primarily. Creating awareness through the help of social media and sessions is also one of our aims. For the same, the organization is working to create a professional blogging-awareness space where related discussions can take place and are accessible to all interested. These discussions are to create a scientifically-backed community for Mental Health discussions.

The problem of lack of access to professional mental health services at an affordable price especially for adolescents and young adults. We’re also working on its root cause which is the stigma in seeking support caused by the widely spread stereotypes and misinformation about mental health.

Around 14% of Indians are affected by some mental illness. Only 7.3 percent of India's 365 million youth population report having mental health issues and an even lesser number actually receive help. The treatment gap in India is incredibly high. As of 2019, there are only 0.75 psychiatrists per 100,000 people and 0.15 psychologists per 100k people. The total suicide rate (per 100,000 people) of India in 2021 was 12.7%. In comparison to the rest of the world, India has an exceptionally low bed allocation for mental health (2.04 beds/100,000 people), according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) Mental Health Atlas 2017.

These alarming stats are mainly a result of factors like lack of mental health awareness; denial or unacceptance by the major part of society; and association of mental health with shame and dismay. This causes people to refrain from seeking help or talking about their illness. They may not even recognize symptoms because they aren’t aware of or educated about them in the first place. 

Mental Health, still being a hushed-down topic in certain parts of India, we believe it is the need of the hour to have a dedicated platform to address mental health issues. Teenage Concerns was initiated to cater to the needs of teenagers and young adults who go through a peak of chaotic emotions during this phase.

Our ongoing projects include building a strong community over our social media handles where we provide research – verified, relatable information and help. We also present intense psychological concepts in simple, comprehensive terms, as a goal to educate and create awareness to a vast audience of every age group.  The information provided also works as a guide to teaching professionals and primary caregivers to extend support.

Our solution will ensure that a distressed young individual has someone to talk to whenever he/she feels anxious and they do not engage in any self-harm methods just because they weren't able to share their concerns with someone. 

We soon hope to build a network of trained First- Response Volunteers, providing a listening ear, and support to the ones in need. 

Through these plans in mind, we aim to normalize the concepts of mental well-being for the younger generation, where it no longer remains taboo. Our main aim- to lower down the alarming rates of self-harm attempts of about 67% of total suicides, among young adults in the past few years.  

In order to understand our population, which are young adults and adolescents, we have conducted an online survey that is available on our social media platforms like Instagram. The survey has open-ended and closed questions which help us receive data that is qualitative and quantitative. By collecting and analyzing the qualitative data, we become aware of the range of adolescents, who are struggling with mental health problems, and the stigma around it. Additionally, this aids in our platform to put up more posts relating to the type of responses we get. For example, in our survey, a question about “what do you think are the main categories of issues teenagers face today?” One of the responses said “Parents do not listen to their children because of which their children hesitate in sharing things with them. Children feel shy and become underconfident with the outside world. Parents should teach their children like a friend not like an enemy. I've gone through this that's why I better understand this condition. Teens have to be dealt with utmost care and they need the freedom to explore the world and this is possible only when their parents support them to their fullest.

We also engaged with a few teenagers who actually felt a lot easier when they share something they were anxious about, like a load been lifted off them. This as well aligns with our goals.

We’re currently in the prototype stage. 

We’ve successfully created our website and social media handles where we regularly post informative and well-researched blog posts and content to educate people, create awareness, help in breaking the stigma around mental health and encourage people to develop a positive attitude towards seeking help and therapy. At present, our website and social media handles facilitate users to approach us for help and support, and members from our team, volunteer to listen to them with empathetic understanding and a non-judgmental attitude while also maintaining their confidentiality. We have also researched for a variety of resources which we share with anyone who approaches us which also helps them in this journey of recovery. Right now, we are working endlessly to create the AI-based web application which would be the next step in our progress.

Our solution proposes to use a new application of an existing technology, that is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence primarily. The two are new and emerging advanced fields of research as well as of wide-scale practical application and potential. Our solution is fundamentally based on the same since we intend to use the potential of these fields to make a well-managed and user-friendly platform for connecting two identities through set parameters and tests. Optimization of required results is what our aim is. Better are the predictions based on information gathered, better help our platform can provide to the distressed. 

Thus resting upon the upcoming technologies like ML-AI, we aim for creating an efficient mental health care sector primely for the young population, which is already tech-savvy and trusts upon technology for better solutions.

The solutions are also proposed to be optimized through extensive data and statistics which not only reflect the problem types from psychometric tests of the distressed but also the engagement of the community in professional blogs and reports about mental health care. This itself requires a specialized field of data science and statistics. These data reports will help in prediction models and optimization of models developed. It will also help in creating a better and well-organized community-based platform for promoting mental health care and destigmatizing the same at a much higher pace and levels. 

The approximate number of high school students, in India, is 131 million and they are about 119 million students in colleges across the country. This results in more than 250 million youth population. According to an estimate by WHO, 7.5% of them suffer from some mental health disorder. This accounts for about 19 million youngsters finding it hard to keep up. As part of our solution for promoting wellbeing for the mental health of teenagers, we aim to serve anyone from this estimate who reaches out to us. Our goal is to help at least 500 students by the end of the year. Our Instagram page currently has 123 followers. We expect that this year would be fruitful in the number of followers, as we are looking for ways to promote our service. We aim high and expect about 5k followers by next year. We also have created a LinkedIn page, and so far, we have 366 followers, we hope to grow this to 5k followers as well by next year. Our social media platforms are predominantly for educating young people outside our curriculum, with more of a focus on current events. 

Our impact goals for next year are to expand our geographical reach to fight against the mental health stigma and help students and young adults in their journey towards recovery.

In addition, we aim to add partner organizations, specifically more local organizations. Furthermore, we aspire to grow our team and increase our followers on social media. 

In order to achieve these goals, our primary focus is to allocate some funding towards our social media platforms, constantly editing our curriculum based on feedback from users and partners.

We also plan to use our student ambassador program to increase our groundwork in all major cities.

By providing a platform, which is student-driven, we try to instill the confidence within them that they will be listened without any judgments. 

Our impacts goals that we envision are as follows-

• We aim to reduce the ever-increasing cases of self-harm attempts by the younger population to as low as possible.
• Increase awareness about the importance of mental health and its impact.
• Helping the student community reach their full potential by helping them in their endeavors.
• Help at least 500 students by providing them with the right mentorship & advice.

We believe,

"The best way to destigmatize something is to talk about it."

By providing reliable information through our website and social media handles, we aim to make mental health, a topic of dinner table conversation in our community and eventually other countries.

In order to measure our progress, we plan to continue using feedback from participants, to improve our current curriculum. Generally, we evaluate our reach through metrics such as our applicant and participant numbers and social media followings. However, we are also in the search to factor in more geographic factors in the coming year. By using surveys, we collect data that can be analyzed and be used as indicators for our progress, as they represent the number of participants who carried it out (survey) and offer us data that needs to be directed to our platforms, thus increasing our progress. 

Among the indicators of the UN’s education sustainable development goals increasing, the number of youth and adults with real-world skills can be used to gain employment. Teenage Concerns aims for goal 3 among the UN sustainable development goals, which is good health and well-being, specifically targeting the goal of promoting mental health and wellbeing. Furthermore, we aim to partner with organizations in order to match our participants with relevant organizations after completing their education. 

We also are aiming to keep a tally of the number of students helped on our website.

Being a non-profit organization creates one of the biggest problems for our team, financially hindering us. Not many people come up to work with us as compared to paid work and this has become one of the prominent barriers in our mission, we plan to bring out better policies and gain external help in order to overcome that.

Being a new startup and considering no brand value, we can also see that teenagers show hesitancy in sharing their problems that too being online during the present circumstances assuming us to be untrustworthy. We plan to increase our brand value to a certain level and gain the trust of our teens.

Another important barrier has been the legalization and recognition from the Government of India which would indirectly help us in terms of brand value as well as provide us with a trustworthy image. This could also provide us enough support financially, which will boost our organization a lot.

But no matter how many barriers exist, we make sure to work towards those challenges in order to accomplish our goals.

Our team is filled with extremely talented people with different qualifications, including students with a degree in psychology, and are trying to rope in qualified representatives.

Apart from that, a few of the designated members have already been part of a similar organization who later stepped out of it in order to create a better solution and fill out the flaws.

We also come from various cultures and cities across India and thus know about the situations everywhere and hence our ideas are not limited to a single community and instead focus on multiple types of situations and challenges faced by teenagers.

Most importantly, Teenage Concerns being an organization that deals with the mental health of teenagers, we sure have roped in enough teenagers who can understand them from their perspective and help him.

Our team has made sure to work together and grow together for the betterment of society while we dive into varied reasons why a problem is faced by a teenager and the solutions to those problems. During this process, we also end up finding solutions for our own problems. While we have made sure to interact with everyone we serve and get in to know their difficulties through various computational techniques to understand common issues as well as the neglected ones and are on our way to successfully bring them out into the light.

As of now, we have not partnered with any organization but we plan to do so to increase our groundwork across the country. We are trying to connect with local schools that can help us create awareness among their students.