Project Soothe journey continues

Professor Stella Chan (University of Reading) created Project Soothe in 2015 as a citizen science project, aiming to gather soothing photos to create a bank of images to help improve mental health and wellbeing. A former winner of the BPS Public Engagement award, Chan has put co-production and public engagement at the heart of all her work. 

Since I last spoke to Stella Chan, she and her team have moved from the University of Edinburgh to the University of Reading and have been evaluating the impact of Project Soothe's bank of images. 'We have found that if you look at 25 to 30 images, immediately your mood improves, and that's a reliable effect that we've seen across many of our experiments. But if you measured people after they watched a nice movie their mood would improve… what we don't know is whether this translates into real health benefits. We're going to look into the longer-term, but we still find this very encouraging… when you're low it's very difficult for you to do something positive, so even a short-term positive mood change is good to help people engage with other coping strategies.'

Chan is in discussions with NHS and third sector services to evaluate the images in clinical populations to look at the longer-term impact of Project Soothe. The images from Project Soothe have also been evaluated when combined with mindful breathing exercises which did seem to enhance the images' positive impact. She has also done research alongside the British Library, combining the project's images with the library's huge collection of nature sounds. However, this did not enhance the positive benefits of viewing the images without sound.

The Wellcome Trust also recently funded Chan and her colleagues to extend Project Soothe to 200 young people and children in schools and in a young offenders' service.

The team has also recently started a music branch of Project Soothe, inviting people to submit music that they find soothing. 'Images are great, but images are just one of our five senses. In some populations, including in neurodiversity, other senses can be very useful to engage with. We have also started collaboration with the Autism Centre at the University of Reading evaluating the effect of our images with people with autism and we've observed that our images also seem to work for the autistic community.'

Public engagement has been at the heart of Project Soothe since its conception – from asking the public to submit the images used in the project, to a public exhibition of the photographs at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden. Chan has also hosted workshops with organisations – sharing findings and materials from Project Soothe. 'We invited a lot of organisations, including charities and the National Trust, to come to our workshop. In the first workshop we gave them training about what we had found in Project Soothe and what we know and don't know, and gave them free access to our materials so they could go back to their organisations and work with their own teams to design an intervention and evaluate it. They then came back for a second workshop to share their experiences.'

The Wellcome Trust also recently funded Chan and her colleagues to extend Project Soothe to 200 young people and children in schools and in a young offenders' service. Initially the children and young people attended four workshops which taught them about mental health as well as research methods in social science. 'When you go out to do public engagement work, we realised we were telling children and young people all of these things, but they need to have critical thinking skills to be able to know which coping strategies have a research evidence base and to make informed decisions about their health and mental health.'

Following the workshops, the young people could sign up to be part of the co-production phase of the project – and around 70 did so. They formed into nine teams, each designed a wellbeing tool using the materials from Project Soothe and had £1,000 to spend in their development.

The tools which the young people developed were hugely varied – one used images from Project Soothe on the front of a pencil case which was filled with objects to support wellbeing such as stress balls, while another wrote and designed a graphic novel using images from the project. Although the first Covid lockdown scuppered Chan's plans to bring the teams together to present their work and celebrate their successes, later some of the young people appeared at Edinburgh International Book Festival to share their experiences of the project. 

The experience of developing Project Soothe was like working on an arthouse film – starting out with an idea and limited budget with the project gradually taking on a life of its own.

'It was really amazing to see the young people talk about it themselves, rather than me… I chaired the discussion but it was their gig. They shared what they produced, their working process, their success and where there were obstacles – for me it was a real highlight of the project. I was incredibly proud of the young people being able to do that through Covid… while schools were closed they found a way forward.'

Chan said the experience of developing Project Soothe was like working on an arthouse film – starting out with an idea and limited budget with the project gradually taking on a life of its own. 'It's quite unusual for a project to receive funding first from the British Academy, which are a humanities funding body, then from the ESRC which is a social science funding body and then the Wellcome Trust which is very much a health and mental health and medical science funding body. That highlights the different elements of the project – there's some medical science in it, a great deal of social science and community work.'

Chan says she is grateful, and 'very excited because there are these different elements that allow me to work with people with different talents – I need to work with artists, I need to work with filmmakers, I need to work with school teachers, children and parents. The project would not have progressed so wonderfully without the hard work of many in the research team and all the partners and participants. It really feels like a project that now has its own life – it's not going the way I plan anymore, because it has its own destination.'

More recently Chan and her team have begun work on a new project inspired by Scotland's Baby Box scheme, where new parents are given a box of essentials for their baby as well as poetry and books. Chan said, given that puberty and the transition from primary to secondary school are a time where mental health problems begin to emerge in young people, she wanted to develop a set of resources as preventative measure and to support wellbeing.

The Resilience Rucksack project has three stages – in the first Chan and the team explored work by the Wellcome Trust which has been commissioning research teams to find the 'active ingredients' in adolescent mental health interventions to find out what really works in the prevention, management and treatment of depression and anxiety in adolescence. Chan used these active ingredients and the results of the literature review to develop some of the key things to be included in the Resilience Rucksack including physical exercise, sleep, and social support.

In stage two of the project Chan consulted with a steering group of teachers, parents, mental health professionals and researchers about their experience of what has helped young people. She also ran a survey with 200 children and young people to ask them what would be helpful for their mental health. Chan now has long-list of 10 'ingredients', and a shortlist of five. The third stage will involve co-production teams developing wellbeing tools which map onto each of the active ingredients. 'At schools we will run a resilience fair where young people will have a rucksack and can visit stations devoted to each of the ingredients and meet a researcher from the field. They can choose which of the wellbeing tools they'd like to take with them, and we can build an evaluation from what they choose.'

To read the Wellcome Trust's report on Active Ingredients in interventions for depression and anxiety.