The work of consultant clinical psychologist Dr Nihara Krause, Founder and CEO of youth mental health charity stem4, has been recognised with an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List, published on June 17th.
Dr Nihara Krause’s work
Over the last 30 years Dr Krause has been dedicated to improving mental health support for young people and families. In 2011 she founded the charity stem4, which focuses on increasing access to early evidence-based mental health interventions to protect the mental health of children and young people. She also advocates for placing the voice of young people and families at the heart of policy-making decisions to drive positive change.
How Dr Krause founded stem4
Nihara Krause was moved to establish stem4 due to a lack early mental health interventions in schools. In the early years of stem4, Dr Krause visited schools to advocate and implement a whole-school approach to supporting the mental health and wellbeing needs of students. Then, as she saw a growing number of young people self-harming, unable to access early help, and placed on long NHS waiting lists for treatment, she created the smartphone app Calm Harm, which uses the principles of dialectic behaviour therapy (DBT) to manage and reduce the urge to self-harm.
Today, Dr Krause, and stem4 work with students, parents and teachers in over 1,800 secondary schools and colleges. Head Ed, stem4’s free multimedia resource, is used in Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PSHE) lessons to teach pupils about mental health.
Since the launch of Calm Harm in 2016, Dr Krause has created and launched four more NHS-approved smartphone apps, all deploying evidence-based strategies, to help young people in handling their mental health difficulties. In addition to Calm Harm, they are: Clear Fear for anxiety; Move Mood for low mood; Combined Minds, which provides families and friends with practical strategies to support teenage mental health, and Worth Warrior, which helps young people experiencing eating difficulties and body image issues.