Project 5/5 ****is an initiative by Sekasin-chat, the national non-profit mental health chat service for young people, and Illusian, the Founder Office of European tech entrepreneurs from Supercell, Wolt, Zalando, Pigment, and others.
We're exploring the possibilities of frontier technologies to improve youth's access to mental health services. Due to high demand, Sekasin-chat has previously been able to respond to just one out of five contact requests. We want to create accessible mental health support for children, youth, and young adults so that each and every one of them can get help whenever they need it.
We’re currently developing an automatic chat service that handles the most common conversation topics using highly specialised large language models. The aim is not to replace human contacts or therapy but to scale the Sekasin-chat operations and cover more languages.
One in seven 10–19-year-olds experience a mental disorder globally. In Europe, suicide is the second leading cause of death of the youth. Depression, anxiety, and behavioural disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents who are growing up in the midst of several global crises.
If we don’t address the adolescent mental health crisis, the problems follow the youth into adulthood, preventing many from leading fulfilling lives. This isn’t an issue for just the individuals to solve. Mental health challenges constitute the largest single source of the world’s economic burden. It’s time we join forces to relieve it.
Solving the mental health crisis of the youth requires a mix of preventative efforts, low-threshold support, and adequate and timely mental health treatment and rehabilitation. We need to invest in the entire chain from prevention to care.
One solution won’t fix everything. Since there’s no silver bullet, we need a bigger and more diverse set of tools for accessible and affordable mental health support. And we need to build those together across sectors and industries.
Sekasin-chat offers 1-to-1 support when a young person doesn't know where to seek help, or when they need encouragement, advice or just low-threshold support and someone to speak to. Anonymity and the freedom to choose what to talk about support their agency.
Based on these principles, we’re developing technological solutions and leveraging AI to scale up our service. We combine generative AI, pre-built paths, and information in a way that maintains the young person's freedom of choice.
We’re using cutting-edge large language models, fine-tuned to capture the tone and empathy of our Sekasin professionals and volunteers. This technology also includes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ensure our responses are always up-to-date with the latest information.
The goal is not to replace human but to extend the forms of help and offer support also when the human assistance is not available; while waiting in the queue and when the chat is closed. The central values of the development are reliability, safety, and the ethics of our choices. It is crucial to distinguish between human assistance and artificial intelligence, but also to offer the young person the freedom to choose their actions and, most importantly, to ensure data security.
Sekasin-chat is a national chat service in Finland, operated by Sekasin Collective. It was specifically designed for young people aged 12–29, offering free, confidential, and anonymous support for mental wellbeing and coping with life’s ups and downs. You don’t need a diagnosis to join the conversation, and no topic is off limits in the 1-on-1 chats.
The chat is staffed with a wide network of professionals and trained volunteers and it operates almost around the clock. People need Sekasin-chat the most during evenings and weekends: 75 percent of contact requests come outside office hours.
Due to high demand, Sekasin-chat has previously only been able to respond to one out of five contact requests. Our mission is that in the future, every single youth gets the support they need whenever they need it.