Roos – BEAM

BEAM is an online-I consider it an app-based program in that it’s not an intervention all on your phone. It’s using an app-based program to provide a mental health program, an intervention which includes real life human connection.  

So BEAM was developed in the first few months of the pandemic. We had an active mental health and parenting intervention going for mothers who are managing chronic depression. And the pandemic hit. And I said, I don’t know what to do. So we went to our parent advisory board.  We went to the people who had participated in the program and wanted to stay involved and said, how are you coping, what do you need, what do you want? I’m having my own challenges. I’m a parent. I said, I’m not exactly sure what to do. So, it was really, really a co-developed intervention, which felt really special in that parents were telling us how they were coping and were giving us feedback on what they thought they needed and what they didn’t need.   

In person we had a two-hour meeting once a week. We provided dinner, we had childcare and games. We provided transportation. We had this really wonderful community building event, and that was just not possible. So instead, parents said, well, we’d love to connect in a group. Maybe we can do Zoom, but we don’t want it to be 2 hours, so an hour max. They also said it would be helpful, though, to have some of the content that we used to have in our two-hour meetings. So maybe you could make some short videos.  OK, so videos. And then the other thing that they mentioned was important to them was that a lot of parents were connecting online on forums such as BabyCenter, on Reddit and talking to other parents, say like, how are you guys managing? I have this challenge. What do I do?  It’s sort of the type of social connection that I think long term a lot of people find they end up having a group of parents that they connect to and say, how are you managing this crazy thing just happened? I can’t believe my kid did this. But not everyone has that, and forums online can provide that support.  

So BEAM really brought these three components together; a brief online therapy group, short psycho educational videos by clinical psychologists, and a forum for parents to connect with each other and other online peer coaches who had lived experience with mental health challenges to provide a mental health support for families. 

We have run four trials now and have funding to do a large five year implementation across Manitoba in partnership with community agencies over the next many years.  We had about 25% of our families enrolled in BEAM from rural areas who said they would never have connected to anything like this if it hadn’t been for the pandemic that they looked for years, it wasn’t possible. And then other families who used to get on a bus in -20 degree weather with two kids to come to our in-person groups. And that was really wonderful. But it is a huge ask for parents to do every week. So, we’re trying to sort of bring the best of both together where we’re having this app-based program but our plan moving forwards is to link up with frontline workers, with the goal of having frontline workers provide a little bit of a systems navigation approach to families who are engaged with the program. 

So, viewing the app-based program and some peer coaching as being the core mental health component, but knowing that mental wellness really lies in the context of community. So, we want people to hopefully go beyond the app to make connections to other parents and connect to local family centers in their neighborhood.