Digitising Mood Matters with AWARE NI

Mood Matters is AWARE’s schools programme. A trained facilitator spends an hour and a half with a class of 14–18 year olds working through a workbook: how depression and anxiety show up, the Five Areas Approach to understanding how thoughts, feelings, behaviour and physical symptoms feed each other, and Take 5. These are the five simple steps to wellbeing that Northern Ireland’s Public Health Agency promotes. Connect. Be active. Take notice. Keep learning. Give.

It works. It has been running for over two decades and has versions for adults, for later years and for new parents. The question AWARE brought to the residency was the one every good classroom programme eventually asks: what happens after the session ends and the workbook goes in the bag?

Two things shaped the early concept. One was Whisper, the anonymous sharing app that was everywhere in 2015, and the observation that teenagers were far more honest about how they felt when their name wasn’t attached. The other was AWARE’s own DOT (Do One Thing) campaign, which asked people to commit to a single small action for their mental health.

Put those together and you get the first version of the idea: an interactive, image-based mood board where a young person who had been through Mood Matters could record how they were feeling, keep it private or share it, and be nudged towards one small thing to do about it.

Over the ten weeks that evolved into something more structured. Rather than a free-form board, the app organised itself around the five Take 5 steps, so every check-in led naturally to an action, and every action belonged to a step the young person had already learned about in class. The project took the working title 5 Digital Steps to Mental Wellbeing, and the prototype became Take 5 Steps for Your Mental Wellbeing. You can read about the product itself on the Take 5 web app page.