Co-Producing an Interdisciplinary, Preventative Mental Health Intervention: Development of the Building Resilience through Socioemotional Training (ReSET) Programme

Objective: Adolescence is a developmental period of increased susceptibility to mental health problems. In response to rising rates of psychopathology in this age group, there have been calls to develop new or more effective preventative interventions that might avert the onset or worsening of mental health problems. In this paper, we detail the development process of a new indicated, transdiagnostic intervention for adolescents: Building resilience through socioemotional training (ReSET). Method: The intervention was co-produced with adolescents and included a pilot study. We highlight how feedback from young people and school mental health practitioners significantly altered the structure of the intervention to maximise the programme’s acceptability to adolescents. Further, we highlight unique challenges that arose through integrating the distinct disciplines of psychotherapy and cognitive neuroscience. Results: After outlining the development process, we summarise the resulting intervention that targets transdiagnostic mechanisms implicated in a range of psychopathologies. The intervention involves a unique combination of techniques derived from psychotherapy and cognitive-emotional training adopted from cognitive neuroscience. Discussion: We discuss how ReSET has a unique opportunity to prevent mental health problems in adolescence and outline the full-scale randomised controlled trial, now underway.