Somewhere at the Health Psychology Section of the Department of Psychology at King’s College London’s Strand campus, researchers are working on a problem that they have already significantly improved. The issue is anxiety and depression in chronically unwell individuals, who make up about 30% of England’s 15.4 million people with long-term physical health illnesses and co-occurring mental health disorders. They have a digital solution.
COMPASS is a screen-based, therapist-supported cognitive behavioral therapy program that is completed at home on any available device. Sessions are conducted at the patient’s own pace and involve five phone calls with a qualified therapist over a twelve-week period. Eighty-nine percent of participants in a randomized controlled trial that was published in Psychological Medicine in 2024 demonstrated a clinically significant improvement in their combined anxiety and depression ratings. Only standard charitable help was given to the comparison group, and their percentage was 45%.
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That figure is very startling. It indicates that a computerized program that was provided remotely and required little therapist time improved psychological distress outcomes by nearly twice as much as standard care. The consequences are significant for a health system under the kind of strain the NHS is facing. The lack of qualified therapists for this particular population is one of the NHS’s most enduring delivery issues, and Professor Rona Moss-Morris, senior author and Digital Therapies theme lead at the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, has identified COMPASS as a potential remedy. These therapists are needed by the program for support calls, but not for the main intervention. It is scalable.
at the meantime, a 20-year-old is finding it much more difficult than necessary to put down their phone at a shared house near London Bridge or a student flat in Waterloo, both of which are close to the IoPPN building. According to a 2025 UK survey, 73% of young individuals between the ages of 18 and 22 use their phones for more than four hours every day. Over three-quarters of respondents stated they thought their smartphones were having a detrimental impact on their academic achievement. 32% of college students worldwide reported having moderate to severe anxiety in the same year. Variations in these numbers have been coming in for a number of years. They land, become absorbed, and not much happens.
Although the conflict between these two realities—the screen as a source of comfort and the screen as a cause of distress—is not exclusive to King’s College London, KCL’s study makes it remarkably apparent. The COMPASS findings are predicated on the fundamental idea that a well-designed and intentionally arranged digital environment can lessen suffering. A distinct theory is suggested by the student mental health data: unstructured digital environments that are accessible around-the-clock and algorithmically optimized for engagement rather than wellbeing are causing widespread misery in the age group that uses them the most.
American universities have started openly addressing the second assumption. There is a total ban on cell phones at Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming. Students are required to turn in their devices upon arrival, check them out only for off-campus travel, and study in a world where the Main Street coffee shop has a distinctly different atmosphere than any other. According to Inside Higher Ed, students who intentionally sought out the college because of its no-phone policy often describe finding it as a sense of relief, as if they had found a place that had already made the difficult choice for them.
The motivation behind these regulations makes sense, and there is genuine appeal to the idea of establishing controlled, low-tech environments on campuses. However, a disheartening finding from a 2025 study on UK school phone limitation policy that was published in ScienceDirect was that pupils whose schools prohibited phones during the day just made up for it by using them more after school.
Social media usage and overall screen time remained almost unchanged. There was no discernible change in wellbeing, anxiety, despair, or sleep quality. The intervention did not decrease the behavior; rather, it shifted it around the clock. This finding does not imply that bans are pointless; rather, it indicates that limiting access without addressing the underlying causes of the behavior is focusing on the incorrect variable.
This is where the COMPASS study provides something that is often overlooked in discussions on phone bans. COMPASS proved that a digital interaction’s goal and design have a significant impact on its impact. When the program was designed around the unique psychological needs of the user rather by engagement metrics, the same general category of activity—sitting alone with a screen, working through emotionally challenging material—produced drastically different results. A Multiple Sclerosis participant expressed feeling “empowered and confident to deal with changes and emotions that life throws at you.” Another person with ulcerative colitis said it changed their life. When discussing their phones, individuals don’t usually use these terms.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that COMPASS addresses a different issue from the one universities are currently debating: how to provide students with real reprieve from digital overwhelm. COMPASS isn’t a detox. It is a highly intentional use of digital tools to deal with a very particular type of discomfort.
An environment that takes the design of their digital lives as seriously as COMPASS takes the design of its sessions is what students appear to be looking for, sometimes overtly. This is something that does not currently exist in institutional form. organized. intentional. designed with their true needs in mind, not what keeps them scrolling.
It’s still unclear if colleges are prepared to spend money on such deliberate planning as opposed to merely limiting access and labeling it a detox.