At CUE, our solutions are built on solid research, and for the past five years, we’ve been deeply focused on supporting teenagers and young adults.
From March 24th to 26th, Yui, our Life Transition Mentor, attended the 2025 Child and Adolescent Mental Health Conference (CAMH25) in Australia. She brought back some eye-opening insights that are already influencing the direction of our research and development, especially for our Mental Relocation Program for Youth.
Organized by the Australian & New Zealand Mental Health Association, these are the topics at CAMH25:
💚Address key mental and emotional health challenges facing children and adolescents in 2025 and plan for brighter future.
💚Support mental health professionals and emerging workers in the field by providing access to networking opportunities and a high level of professional development.
💚Provide a platform for government policy and initiatives to update, inform and seek feedback from the people who are delivering the services in the community.
💚Encourage multi-sectoral collaboration and create an engaging space for knowledge sharing, and learning opportunities within the CAMH community.
💚Include a youth voice as we work towards solutions for all young people.
Here are 3 talks/topics that stood out — and how they impact CUE’s R&D：
1. Texting is the New Interview: Qualitative Research with Teenagers 🤳🏽
A compelling research method involved using WhatsApp text messaging to engage teenagers, recognizing that teens rarely engage in deep, linear conversations the way adults expect. This communication style isn’t merely a result of shortened attention spans among today’s teens — although concerns about constant exposure to fast-paced, short-form content on social media are valid — rather, it seems to reflect a fundamentally different way of processing and relating.
In her own counseling practice, Yui observed that her teenage clients often jump between topics within one session, and a significant issue discussed in one session might be completely absent the next. This isn’t a lack of seriousness — it appears to be a reflection of how teen attention and emotional processing unfold in more fluid, jumpy ways. Teens tend to communicate in micro-moments, not extended dialogues, and they process emotional experiences non-linearly, often circling back later or skipping over parts entirely.
These patterns challenge conventional adult approaches to communicating with teens — whether as teachers, counselors, or parents — which often assume that change and growth must follow a structured, logical flow of conversation. For teens, communication would benefit more from emphasizing emotional pacing, safety, and timing.
It is probably more effective to engage with teenagers the way they engage with each other, which rarely involves deep, structured conversations. Adults must seek entry points — moments when teens are ready to talk, even if briefly or unpredictably.
What this means for CUE:
We need to tailor emotionally paced modular, “snack-sized” content and tools that allow emotional processing in micro-moments. Moreover, our overall designs must allow return visits to themes or topics, recognizing that emotional integration often happens in loops, not ladders.
2. Ambiguous Loss: A Hidden Grief 😶🌫️
“Ambiguous loss” is no new concept, but in one session, it was discussed as a significant yet often invisible form of psychological stress among children and young people. This demographic most likely lacks the knowledge, life experience, or emotional capacity to fully understand or articulate loss, making it ambiguous. They may feel a sense of “not knowing” what happened, yet still carry the emotional weight of the loss. An example of this is when children are removed from their families by child protection services.
With ambiguous loss, individuals may experience:
🔹’Frozen’ in loss, including outrage and an inability to move forward;
🔹Confusion, distress, helplessness and hopelessness,.
🔹Blocked coping mechanisms;
🔹Denial of change or loss /denial of facts,
🔹Refusal to talk about the individuals and the situation;
🔹Rigidity of thinking (maintaining that things will return as before);
🔹Difficulties with boundaries and roles
This concept mirrors some of the stories we encountered during informal conversations with parents, high school teachers and study abroad mentors. Often, the behaviors we observe in teens are categorized as typical teenage problems or attributed to challenging family dynamics. However, after hearing this presentation, we are given a new perspective. It seems probable that some of these teens are experiencing ambiguous loss, particularly those preparing to study abroad.
As they prepare to leave behind the familiar environment of family, friends, school, the neighbourhood and city they grew up in—along with the phase of adolescence—many students may be subconsciously experiencing a sense of loss, even if they can’t yet name it. This emotional undercurrent often goes unaddressed, as studying abroad is typically framed as quite the opposite, an experience of attainment.
What this means for CUE: Our solution must integrate modules and tools to help youth name and process complex emotional experiences of loss and saying goodbye, even when it seems blurry or inexplicable. Mental relocation begins with validating what was never said out loud.
3. Balancing Prevention and Resilience: A Dual Approach to Supporting Youth ⚖️
Yui observed that several scholars and practitioners emphasized the equal importance of knowledge-based prevention (e.g., does the child know how to recognize and avoid danger?) and resilience-based intervention (e.g., can they recover when something does go wrong?). Examples included online bullying, sexual exploitation, and digital scams. This is especially relevant in today’s world, where the digital and material realms are deeply intertwined. Internet content that circulates in the world of children and teenagers is unlikely to circulate in the world of adults; in such a landscape, how can we, as adults, meaningfully prepare them to navigate dangers we may not even see or be able to foresee?
Yui recalled one striking case from China involving an adult deceiving children into sharing their passwords in an online game, only to enter their accounts and destroy the virtual worlds they had painstakingly built. While this might seem like a minor digital incident from an adult’s perspective, for the children, however, it represented a profound violation. These game worlds were personal, creative spaces into which they had invested time, care, and emotion and grew attachment. The breach not only caused emotional distress at the moment but also possibly planted seeds of general relational distrust that may persist into later life stages.
What this means for CUE: In designing each of our solutions, we have yet to fully integrate both knowledge-based prevention and resilience-based intervention. Take, for example, our mental relocation program for teenagers. Our research has heavily focused on building resilience, but we also recognize that navigating a new environment on their own means that their previous understanding of what constitutes “danger” has shifted. It’s crucial to prepare youth for this change in perspective as well.
By combining these two approaches, CUE can better prepare teens not only to bounce back from challenges but also to anticipate and avoid some of them in the first place.
