Mental health disorders disproportionately affect young adults in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where access to care remains severely limited. Digital mental health technologies have emerged as potentially scalable and cost-effective tools to address this gap, yet rigorous large-scale evidence on their causal impacts on both mental health and educational outcomes is scarce.

In this seminar Professor Mauricio Avendano will discuss a study assessing the impact of a co-designed digital mental health platform based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) on mental health, education and economic outlook of vulnerable young adults in higher education participating in a nationwide conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia (n = 14,688). Using a randomised controlled trial design, we show that access to a digital CBT platform significantly reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety among low-income university and vocational students, with intention-to-treat effects of −0.080 standard deviations on our primary mental health index (PHQ-ADS) immediately post-intervention and −0.045 standard deviations three months later. Mental health improvements were robust across multiple specifications and were substantially larger among students who actively engaged with the platform. However, we find no evidence that these improvements translated into gains in academic performance, dropout rates, or future economic expectations within our observation window.

Our findings demonstrate that digital mental health interventions can achieve meaningful symptom reductions when deployed at scale in LMICs, while highlighting the critical challenge of user engagement as a barrier to broader impacts on life outcomes. Results inform ongoing policy debates about whether and how digital tools can complement existing mental health infrastructure to address the global treatment gap for young adults in resource-constrained settings.

 

About the speaker

Mauricio Avendano is Professor at the University of Lausanne (Unisanté), where he co-directs the Health Economics and Policy Unit and the Lausanne Centre for Health Economics, Behaviour and Policy. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Harvard University and Visiting Professor at King’s College London. His research focuses on how social and economic policies shape population health, with a particular emphasis on youth mental health and ageing. He studies how education, labour markets, social protection, and welfare policies influence mental health outcomes across the life course. He also examines how mental health influences human capital accumulation and labour market outcomes later in life in low-and-middle-income countries. He applies quantitative methods, including natural experiments, longitudinal data, and randomised controlled trials, to identify causal effects of policies on mental health and wellbeing. He has published over 160 papers in international journals. In 2024, he was elected International Fellow of the British Academy.