Boosting Societal Adaptation and Mental Health in a Rapidly Digitalising, Post-Pandemic Europe

Bootstrap’s overall aim is to initiate health and social policy and practice change designed to reduce the harmful effects of digitalisation on mental health by (1) co-creating an evidence-based platform of digital behavioural health interventions addressing vulnerability to problematic usage of the internet in young people and testing its effectiveness to self-manage ill-health prevention, and (2) developing a policy toolkit to promote human digital rights accountability at local, national, and European level.

The Bootstrap consortium’s ambition is to mitigate the mental health burden and aid psychosocial adjustment to the combined challenges of rapidly increasing digitalisation and the COVID-19 pandemic by addressing a range of contemporary adaptation issues manifesting as ‘problematic usage of the internet’ that undermine public health and societal wellbeing by increasing vulnerability to mental and physical ill-health, addiction, medical misinformation and vaccine hesitancy. To balance the beneficial and harmful effects of digitalisation on mental health and wellbeing, it is our vision that we need to 1) focus on improving self-management of internet usage (in a broad sense, including social media, messaging, gaming, gambling etc); and 2) explore policy options to regulate digital companies’ activities to reduce harms associated with their products.