Things that make you go : ) | Auckland News | Local News in Auckland

Take a positive look at life - that's the message some Macleans College students are being asked to consider. Rowena Orejana reports.

After school, Macleans College Year 11 student Deborah Yi opens her mobile phone, anticipating text messages. They pop up as cartoons, skits by young actors, video-diary entries or even inspirational messages from celebrities.

Deborah is one of 850  students from 15  Auckland secondary schools taking part in a study called MEMO + Space, led by Dr Sally Merry. The study aims to give kids a boost and help them through the notoriously difficult teenage years.

"It's basically an intervention developed on the mobile phone to try to support the resilience in young people and to help them approach life in a positive way. It will also help them to combat low mood," says Dr Merry, associate professor at the Auckland School of Medicine, specialising in child and adolescent mental health.

The young people receive two texts a day over  nine weeks. After they're sent a monthly top-up. The study's researchers meet students individually  three times through the year.

Macleans College head of guidance Graeme Martin is enthusiastic about the study. He says it has already identified students who are at risk of letting their concerns overwhelm them but otherwise appear to be coping.

"How do you deliver support to people you haven't identified? This study showed us some really good methods to identify students who are at risk, but also to support all those students who aren't at risk and may never become at risk," he says.

Dr Merry says the programme was designed for young people who are basically fine. "When we actually talk to them, we would sometimes uncover some difficulties that young people were having and we make sure they got appropriate help for that.  So one of the potential positives - if we roll this out nationally - might be that we might be setting alongside some sort of tracking mechanism so that we could pick up things that young people overlook."

As the study is not yet complete, Dr Merry says there is still a way to go to find out if it actually works. "If we find it works, then it would be relatively easy to scale up and deliver to every young person in New Zealand. That would be the dream, I guess. But that would need funding."

Feedback from  Macleans students involved has so far been positive. Year 10  pupils Phoebe Richardson and Tony Sun say the messages were very helpful. "It makes you think about other stuff," says Tony.

"You feel like you should actually be happy because you have a rather good life. Everyone has problems and that they can be, if you think about it, manageable," says Phoebe.

Dr Merry hopes the project will get financial support.  "The first thing to do is to see if it works. And then, if it does, I think it's quite likely that we'll get somebody to support this," she says. "We're hoping that the Government would be interested ...  because it's a way of supporting positive mental health."

Messages 4 you by

The programme is supported by the Health Research Council, the Clinical Trial Research Unit, the Werry Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, the University of Auckland, Vodafone and Hyperfactory.