This report addresses the mental health and well-being of adolescents in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan through a comprehensive Digital Ecosystem Analysis. This initiative maps available digital resources that support adolescents through the provision of culturally sensitive and accessible mental health services.

Executive summary: We supported UNICEF in exploring innovative ways to understand online mental health and well-being discourse. Our project looked at using AI to identify online discussions of young people on mental health, combining focus group input, annotated datasets, and experiments with large language models (LLMs) in English and Russian.

This presentation, prepared by Dr Clare Llewellyn, a lecturer in Governance, Technology and Data at the University of Edinburgh, outlines the methods and key findings of our project with UNICEF which investigated developing a methodology for using AI to identify social media discussions on mental health and well-being from young people and adolescents.   

Infographic: As part of our project focusing on developing a methodology for using AI to identify social media discussions of mental health and well-being, we ran a few youth engagement sessions together with UNICEF country offices in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.