Innovate UK grant for Tellmi to develop state of the art suicide prevention service for young people

Innovate UK has given Tellmi a grant of £393,823 to integrate machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) into the Tellmi app to create a state of the art suicide prevention solution for Children and Young People (CYP) aged 11+.

The Tellmi app delivers free, safe, anonymous, pre-moderated, peer support to 56k CYP. Tellmi has been independently evaluated and demonstrated to improve mental health in CYP (AFC, 2021).

In 2020, Tellmi supported 794 CYP expressing suicidal ideation. When suicidal ideation becomes suicidal intent, CYP don't seek support because they feel they have 'gone past help' (Biddle, 2020). Because 40% of CYP who die by suicide have no contact with the mental-health system (Rodway, 2020), suicide prevention tools which only focus on CYP in crisis exclude the majority who go on to take their lives (Kessler, 2019). Successful suicide prevention solutions must deliver increased support before distress becomes acute.

This innovation, developed in collaboration with Bristol University Medical School and University of Sussex Department of Informatics, integrates ML and NLP into the Tellmi app to interrogate passive as well as high risk, data to identify risk patterns, analyse semantic content and predict risk.

When risk patterns are detected, CYP are automatically stepped-up into a suicide support stream for clinical supervision and trained responder peer support. NLP integrates smart links to topic matched resources. Crucially, CYP doesn't have to ask for additional support. When distress deescalates, support steps down and CYP re-join their peers. AI continues to monitor risk.

Because most suicides occur between midnight and 4 a.m. (Perlis, 2016) mirror provision in Australia facilitates 24/7 global delivery.

TellmiSaives is important because suicide is the leading cause of death in UK CYP (ONS, 2018) and for every suicide, there are 20 non-fatal suicide attempts (WHO, 2018). By the age of 17, 7.4% of UK CYP have attempted suicide (Millenium Cohort Study, 2021). In 2017, 72% of UK CYP suicides were male; 14% were black/minority ethnic; 5% were LGBT (NCISH, 2017).

The lifetime cost of one youth suicide is £9.75 M (Platt, 2006) yet the estimated 10 year ROI for every £1 invested in suicide prevention is £39.11 (McDaid, 2017). Late intervention in youth mental health costs public services an estimated £17bn a year (Oppenhim, 2015). The UK spends £49.7 M PA treating paracetamol poisoning alone (Bateman, 2014). This high risk, technically challenging innovation could provide the 2M UK CYP with mental health issues with 24/7, 365-day, access to crisis and continuous support for <£40M P.A.