Guest blogger Dr Nina Higson-Sweeney, Oxford Centre for Emerging Minds Research, explains the project and the impact parents and carers had. 

New research on youth mental health is published every day, but finding and making sense of this research is not always easy. Academic papers can be hidden behind paywalls, written in specialist language, and it can be hard to understand the impact of the findings in the real world.

Developing Minds Digest was created to help address this issue. This website is free to access and shares the latest youth mental health research through short, jargon-free summaries aimed at parents, carers, teachers, and clinicians.  

Each summary explains what the study investigated, what the researchers found, and what the findings mean for different groups of people. All summaries include a link to the original academic paper and say whether this paper can be read for free.

Importantly, the website was not designed by researchers alone. Earlier this year, members of the Parent Carer Research Network took part in online workshops to help co-design the website. They shared their thoughts and feedback on content, design, functionality, credibility, and implementation. Separate workshops were also held with teachers, clinicians, and researchers.

Across the workshops, participants asked for research summaries that were short, straightforward and jargon-free, while still providing enough context to understand the findings. Stakeholders wanted clear practical implications, links to the original research, and transparency about how research was selected and reviewed. They also emphasised the importance of an easy-to-navigate website, with clear topic tags, accessible design, and signposting to trusted sources of further information and support. These priorities directly informed the development of Developing Minds Digest.

Nina Higson-Sweeney says: 

Having the opportunity to sit down, listen to, and discuss our ideas with members of the Parent Carer Research Network was vital to the development of this website. Together, we have co-designed something that addresses so many of the barriers that parents and carers report experiencing when searching for mental health information online, including lack of time, lack of access, and not knowing if a resource can be trusted. The project is still at an early stage, and we are still looking for feedback, but we hope that this will be a useful resource for the foreseeable future.

For parents and carers, Developing Minds Digest provides a free way to keep up with current research in youth mental health, without needing specialist knowledge or access to academic journals. Research summaries can be easily explored by topic, and each summary highlights what the findings might mean for parents and carers, while being clear about the limitations of the research. The aim is not to tell parents and carers what to think or do, but to make the evidence easier to find, understand, and use.

Developing Minds Digest is now live, and we would like to thank everyone from the Parent Carer Research Network who contributed to its development. We hope members will enjoy exploring the finished website and seeing how their ideas and feedback have been put into practice.

This work has been supported by the University of Oxford’s Public and Community Engagement (PCER) Fund, the Parent Carer Research Network (which is co-facilitated by the Mental Health in Development theme at the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre: Oxford Health and the Charlie Waller Trust), and the Oxford Centre for Emerging Minds Research.