Supporting our young patients with psychosis and depression using AI: Researchers awarded almost £5m in funding
Patients and service users at South London and Maudsley will be one of the first to benefit from a multimillion pound research into a new digital tool to help young people with psychosis and depression.
Our partners at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) were recently awarded £4.9 million Wellcome funding to develop and evaluate an AI-supported intervention for cognitive difficulties in young people with psychosis and depression.
Our patients and service users will be some of the first to benefit from this innovative tool to support their wellbeing and long term recovery. The research and creation will be created in collaboration with people with lived experience and will be trialled using young people aged 16 to 25 with early psychosis and depression from UK NHS Trusts, including South London and Maudsley.
Professor Matteo Cella, Clinical Psychologist at the Trust, said: “Despite robust evidence for Cognitive Remediation, there are major challenges in implementing this intervention in a clinical setting due to the amount of therapist input needed.
“With this Wellcome Mental Health Award, we can address this gap by developing an AI chatbot, which will not only alleviate clinical resource constraints, but also provide the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence with evidence for broader implementation of both Cognitive Remediation and digital therapeutics in health services.”
Cognitive Remediation is an evidence-based psychological intervention which improves cognition and functioning. This is the basis for CIRCuiTS, a platform developed at King’s College London which delivers Cognitive Remediation and has been shown to benefit young people with psychosis.
The research programme is part of the Wellcome Mental Health Award ‘Accelerating scalable digital mental health interventions’, beginning in 2026 and taking place over the next five years.
