Helping Give Away Psychological Science

Most of the health burden in the United States is due to lifestyle, behavioral, and mental health challenges [1]. Psychological principles have much to offer children, adolescents, and families, not just in terms of therapy, but also assessment, education, and intervention-based positive change. Yet the public is not getting most of the benefit it could from this knowledge base, due to lack of awareness of it and inability to find, access, or apply it.

Across all demographics, people increasingly rely on technology to find information and educate themselves. Google is the number one most visited site on the internet, and it has a special partnership with Wikipedia (Wiki), the fifth most visited site. If someone conducts a search online, and there is a Wikipedia page on the topic, Google places it on the first screen of hits. This prime showcase would cost a tremendous amount of advertising dollars, but Google supports Wikipedia's belief that information wants to be free and readily available.

The quality of material on Wikipedia is variable, from questionable “stubs” on obscure topics to state-of-the-science pages. Overall, the quality is broader and better than Encyclopedia Britannica based on multiple studies, but the pages related to psychology and mental health are incomplete. Putting our best information there solves the issue of public awareness: Google and Siri will put the page a click away.

Helping Give Away Psychological Science (HGAPS, https://hgaps.org) is a college-student-centered 501c3 nonprofit co-founded by Youngstrom, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and past-president of the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (SCCAP), focused on bringing the best information to those who would benefit. Given that the vast majority of youth now have virtually round-the-clock access to information via multiple digital platforms [2], the publication of credible health information should capitalize on these natural dissemination opportunities. One of the main ways HGAPS achieves this is by editing Wiki pages through varied collaborations. Over a 5-year period, HGAPS has received more than a dozen grants and donations from professional societies and foundations, with >90% of the budget going toward student travel awards, prizes, and pizza. If you feed them, they will come: we have worked with more than 300 student editors, working on more than 300 pages, building resources that have so far been used more than 25,000 times. Furthermore, these pages have been viewed more than 150 million times and counting [3, 4].

HGAPS is a work in progress and we are learning as we go. Wikipedia has a sister site, Wikiversity, that is geared more toward teaching and technical information. We are now matching different sites for specific audiences: Wikipedia for the general public and Wikiversity for clinicians, students, and researchers, as well as specific audiences in need of more depth and resources especially relevant for youth and families. For example, on Wikipedia we are improving the quality of information about parenting styles and assessment and treatment options, and we are building pages for the best of the free assessment tools [3, 5]. Unfortunately, in the field of clinical child and adolescent psychology, the dissemination and use of evidence-based assessments and treatments is not commonplace due to a number of barriers, including the science-to-practice gap and economic limitations. Complicating matters, one of the unintended consequences of keeping material “free” is that it has no advertising budget and no commercial incentive to market it. The science and best free measures help no one unless they can be found and used. Fortunately, Wikipedia is a potent solution for filling dissemination and science-to-practice gaps.

Indeed, on Wikiversity, HGAPS has an Evidence-Based Assessment Center (https://www.hgaps.org/assessment-center.html) that organizes tools and techniques by time and topic [6]. The timing aspect groups things that can be done ahead of the first visit with a mental health care professional (online screening, intake questionnaires, risk factors), things to do during the first interview (checklists, semi-structured interviews, cultural considerations in formulation), and things to do over the rest of treatment (process, progress, and outcome measures). Tools are grouped by topic (depression, anxiety, attention, substance misuse, etc.) and include links to PDFs as well as Wikiversity pages containing scoring instructions, summaries of the supporting evidence, and links to resources. Through valuable input from students and professionals, we are making things even more convenient to use. The most exciting example is the Evidence-Based Assessment Center, where we are automating the scoring so that individuals can take up to 70 different measures for free, and subsequently print or download a summary to share with a professional [6]. The feedback includes links to information about mental health topics, treatments, and ways to search for a provider. As another example of a publicly available linked initiative on evidence-based assessment, the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance Screening Center (https://www.dbsalliance.org/education/mental-health-screening-center/) has dozens of measures, and by the fall of 2019 had 26,000 uses in the first year [3, 4, 7]. The upgraded versions of these two related web-based assessment platforms will be accessible via several professional society pages (eg, the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology) as well as via Wiki, multiplying the ways that people can access them at no cost.

HGAPS has grown rapidly. Sister student clubs have started at Appalachian State University, the University of Maryland, and the University of California-Los Angeles, in addition to UNC-Chapel Hill. Students, both undergraduate and graduate, are voluntarily taking time out of their schedules to devote to identifying evidence-based information for youth seeking help online. As teams are learning how to identify good resources and make fast and effective edits, they have shown tremendous creativity and compassion in the issues that they have tackled. These have included building pages about coping with hurricanes [8], flooding, and wildfires, as well as school shootings and community violence. Students have attended professional conferences on travel awards and engaged with experts on how to extend the reach of the programming and ensure widespread usage. The Netflix series 13 Reasons Why (13RW) galvanized a “What We Wish They Knew” response page on Wikiversity that contains resources geared particularly toward youth on relevant topics including bullying, coping with trauma and assault, and substance misuse, in addition to the core theme of suicide prevention [9]. The work of HGAPS to help youth exposed to the some of the controversial material in 13RW was featured recently in a national science publication [10]. In summary, HGAPS is bringing together service-minded students and content experts to help provide the best psychology has to offer in places and formats that are informing and empowering the people who would benefit.

• ©2020 by the North Carolina Institute of Medicine and The Duke Endowment. All rights reserved.