Hearing real stories from the Baatcheet Research Programme for Youth Mental Health

Although 20 per cent of the world’s 16-24-year-olds live in India, less than 10 per cent of youth with common mental health problems (anxiety and depression) can access care due to resource constraints and other barriers such as pervasive stigma around mental health. The use of personal stories offers a promising solution for delivering age-appropriate and non-stigmatising mental health support at scale.

Storytelling is a fundamental human process for generating meaning from personal and collective experiences. Recent research, including by our team (Gonsalves 2023, Gonsalves 2019) has shown that narrative health interventions can create meaning from illness experiences, share new coping strategies and help peers connect through shared stories. However, a major gap exists for storytelling approaches that actively involve disadvantaged youth in design, delivery and evaluation.

With proof-of-concept funding from Grand Challenges Canada, the Baatcheet project was jointly led by Dr Pattie Gonsalves at Sangath in New Delhi and our team at King’s IoPPN, running from 2022 to 2024.

The initial idea for Baatcheet was to incorporate youth mental health narratives directly from the target setting (schools, universities and youth community centers in New Delhi) and offer structured peer support to engage with the story-based content.

The intervention was intended to yield changes in how users would understand and respond to their anxiety or depression by building capacity for reflective self-care and enhancing a sense of personal control that is particularly lacking for chronically stressed and multiply disadvantaged youth.

The Baatcheet team co-designed the innovation with young people aged 16-24 years who had diverse lived experiences of common mental health problems and social marginalization.

Story content was curated initially from an established storytelling website and a “web museum” of youth mental health stories that were developed by Sangath. The team deliberately opted for a pared-down digital platform that would be appropriate for harnessing the intimacy and immediacy of storytelling and help navigate mental health challenges through shared personal stories.

Interactive co-design workshops and wider stakeholder consultations were used to further establish the following:

• Culturally adaptive personal narratives of coping with and recovering from anxiety and depression
• Engaging media formats for presenting narrative content
• Tools for developing personalised goals and action plans, where users can apply coping strategies identified from the available stories
• Viable methods for reaching underserved groups and delivering relational support from trained youth facilitators

The developmental process for the project has been described in the paper Co-design of “Baatcheet,” a peer-supported, web-based storytelling intervention for young people with common mental health problems in India published in Cambridge Prisms: Global Mental Health.

Based on the team's experience, another paper has been published in the Health Education Journal offering recommendations to those who are planning their own co-design projects with young people in low- and middle-income countries.

A pilot evaluation of Baatcheet was completed in 2024 and the findings are being written up for publication. The team is also applying for new funding to carry out more extensive testing of the intervention when delivered on a larger scale.