UCL Digital Mental Health Hub

What is UCL Digital Mental Health Hub?

Founded in 2025 by Martin Dechant, Ciaran O’Driscoll, and Bettina Moltrecht, the UCL Digital Mental Health Hub unites 30 experts across clinical psychology, engineering, design, and creative research under one shared mission: transforming mental healthcare through technology. We have five major project themes: the development and evaluation of digital interventions including apps, iCBT, AI, and VR; the impact of social media and online environments on mental health; design for mental wellbeing, integrating mental health principles into everyday environments; real-world data and computational psychiatry, using smartphone and sensor data to build more personalised models of mental health; and implementation, ethics, and HCI, addressing the critical challenges of bringing digital tools into healthcare safely and equitably.

The Hub investigates how digital technologies affect wellbeing, develops innovative mental health tools, and works to ensure those tools are rigorously evaluated and meaningfully implemented in real healthcare settings. In a space crowded with digital health tools of varying quality, the Hub challenges how we assess what is helpful. These efforts bridge research, clinical practice, and policy to ensure digital mental health solutions are effective, evidence-based, and ready for real-world healthcare settings.

Current Funded Projects 

SPIKE: Social Phobia Intervention for Key Cybersecurity Exploit Mitigation

Social engineering attacks account for 98% of all cybersecurity breaches — yet the role of mental health in making individuals more vulnerable remains largely unexplored. SPIKE addresses this gap by investigating how social anxiety shapes susceptibility to AI-driven attacks. Through qualitative interviews, co-created scenarios, and workshops bringing together people with lived experience, clinicians, and cybersecurity experts, the project aims to understand the cognitive and emotional responses that leave socially anxious individuals at greater risk — and to co-design a research agenda for future interventions that build real-world digital resilience. This project has been supported by the UCL Grand Challenge Team.

Mental Environment Ergonomic Tools (MEET): Designing Furniture to Prevent Mental Strain at Work

Around 70% of neurodivergent professionals are affected by overstimulating, inflexible, or inaccessible workplaces — contributing to chronic stress, burnout, and reduced workforce participation. M.E.E.T. tackles this head-on by co-designing, prototyping, and evaluating smart, inclusive furniture that reduces sensory stressors and supports neurodivergent wellbeing in hybrid work environments. Moving beyond traditional ergonomics, the project introduces the concept of mental ergonomics — challenging designers, policymakers, and organisations to rethink the office not just as a physical space, but as a mental health environment. Findings will be translated into practical design guidelines and policy briefs to drive lasting, systemic change. This project is in collaboration with the furniture company Ahrend and supported by the UCL Grand Challenge Team

MIND-E – Mental Health Intervention Network for Digital Evaluation

There is a critical need for standardised evaluation and quality control in response to the increasing prevalence of digital mental health interventions. The rapid proliferation of digital mental health solutions has outpaced the establishment of standardized evaluation criteria. The lack of which increases risks of patient safety, health inequalities and ineffective resource allocation. Therefore, we started MIND-E, a network of experts in clinical psychology and engineering as part of the digital mental health hub. The goal of our network is to create spaces and opportunities for innovative, evidence-based evaluation methods to address these gaps and enhance the overall quality of digital mental health solutions.

Grimdark Narratives and Community Wellbeing: Co-Designing Mental Wellbeing Resources for Gaming Communities
Can tabletop wargaming be a tool for mental health? This knowledge exchange network explores exactly that. Led by Dr Martin Dechant (UCLIC),  Dr Mike Ryder (Lancaster University), Dr Tomas Arnold (Heidelberg University), and Dr Max Friehs (University of Twente) and supported by Prof. Aneesha Singh (UCLIC) and Prof. John King (UCL CEHP), the project investigates how narrative-driven gaming communities , particularly around Warhammer and other tabletop games, can foster belonging and wellbeing, while also examining risks around social isolation and radicalisation. Built around the Warhammer Conference 2026 and co-design workshops, the network will produce a community mental health toolkit, ethical design guidance for narrative creators, and a policy brief for the creative industries.

Get Involved!

Passionate about the grimdark future or fantasy? We have two exciting opportunities to work together with you:
 

1. Submit an abstract to the Warhammer Conference: We’re welcoming work from across HCI, Psychology, Philosophy, Game Studies, Theology, and more which uses the narratives and the grim dark fantasy and/or future as part of their research or challenge our real world understanding using concepts of dark fantasy. Full call at warhammer-conference.com.
2. Join us our knowledge exchange activity about mental wellbeing and grim dark narratives & gaming: Whether you’re a researcher, clinician, designer, or gamer, get in touch with Martin Dechant at [martin.dechant@ucl.ac.uk].  We want to hear from you!