×
Wednesday 25 March 2026
12:00 — 13:00 GMT · Online (Microsoft Teams) · Free
12:00 — 13:00 GMT · Online (Microsoft Teams) · Free
Can Good
Mental Health
'Go Viral'?
Machine learning · Network science · Community-led healing
How do you design mental health intervention that transforms individuals and communities? Can we develop plans that dream big, shift systems that have rarely worked for us, raise expectations — and stay real?
We're sharing BLKOUT UK's Critical Frequency project — a proposal that draws on machine learning, data innovation, and behavioural economics to design a mental health intervention for and with Black queer men. Not just for individuals, but for the networks they belong to.
The specificity is deliberate. Getting it right for a specific group avoids the slide into generic-serves-no-one services. The margins influence the centre.
When you change the evidence base, change how a community relates to treatment, and change what we actually know about what works — the system shifts whether or not it was invited to.
And when we say therapy, we don't mean Eurocentric, white-normative clinical models. We mean therapy in its broadest sense: anything that is healing for a person. Peer support, cultural practice, community connection, and relationship-building are therapeutic interventions — not nice things that happen alongside the real clinical work.
Solidarity is built through challenge, not around it.
R
Dr Rob Berkeley MBE
Co-Director, BLKOUT UK
A single arc from vision to methodology: the problem, the vision, networks and behavioural change, machine learning and data innovation, what we're learning — and what we don't yet know.
A
Dr Ariel Breaux Torres
In conversation
Exploring the assumptions and interrogating the logic. The upstream/downstream tension. Decolonising therapy. Health-seeking behaviour and harmful healthcare. Specificity and transferability. The logic of transformation.
25m
Presentation
Rob presents Critical Frequency as a work in progress, not a finished product. From problem to vision to open questions.
20m
In Conversation
Ariel and Rob think through the model together. Not defending it — stress-testing it.
10m
Your Questions
Open floor. The work gets stronger through challenge. Bring your experience.
Register Now
Grab your lunch and pull up a chair · Free · Online via Teams