MyTBrain’s Origin Story
Where it started
MyTBrain was born out of frustration. Years ago I was engaging young people across services at a small charity in Yorkshire, and kept noticing that the evidence-based resources we had didn’t look or feel good, or land with them. So I drew my own, taking the theory and making it something young people could actually engage with, and ran them in CAMH CBT groups for anxiety, twelve young people at a time. Young people engaged, and the sessions felt less clinical and more like a community. That’s where my love of turning theory into visuals that make a difference started.
I began posting the drawings and animations on Instagram, which grew into training and resource packs for schools through my CAMH education link role. That’s how MyTBrain began.
What I learnt
I didn’t grow up understanding children’s rights, I went under the radar as a child and I didn’t know I had a brain with needs. I was angry and acting out without understanding why. It took one or two incredibly patient people to help me see I needed support. That’s where the pull came from: I wanted every young person to understand their brain long before adulthood.
It started to click through thirteen years of smaller roles. As a young carers’ worker, Annie and I led young carers in writing a charter that won them a young carers card and real adjustments across Kirklees schools. At Anna Freud I worked solely on youth participation and learned the methodology behind lived experience. I was invited to facilitate a session for European youth with WHO Europe’s Pan-European Mental Health Coalition in Albania, and that is where MyTBrain properly took shape: not just support and knowledge, but a pathway into shaping the systems around them using their own lived experience.
Where we’re going
The thread running through my career turned out to be quality of care, something I didn’t have a name for until I ended up at WHO and was told that’s what our office is for. It felt like I’d been working toward this the whole time.
That’s the organisation we are building: one with youth voice at its centre, working to improve the systems young people rely on, for the young people and services who come after us.
If that speaks to you, whether you’re a young person, a professional or a parent, I’d love you to join us on the journey.
Hannah Brunskill
Founder, MyTBrain CIC
Meet the Team
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Annie Monaghan
COO - Australian Operations
Annie is a specialist youth worker with 15+ years' experience working with vulnerable young people. She started out leading a youth club in Moston, Manchester, before spending many years leading National Lottery and Children in Need funded projects. She has excellent project management skills.She holds a Master's in Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Wellbeing from Edge Hill University. WHO brought her in for her service evaluation expertise to work on the clinical audit tool for mental health services and governments across Europe.
She's now based in New South Wales, working in drug services and running operations for the Australian side of MyTBrain.
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Dr Saul Hillman
Director of Neurodiversity & Research
Saul is a Senior Research Fellow at the Anna Freud Centre and Honorary Lecturer in Psychology at UCL, with over 30 years as an academic, researcher and clinician. His research has focused on children and young people experiencing adversity, including studies with children in care, adopted children, and neurodivergent young people, with participation and lived experience running through all of it. He's also Lead Trainer for the Story Stem Assessment Profile (SSAP), having worked on its development, research and training for over 25 years, and supervises postgraduate students in research and clinical practice. Alongside his academic work, Saul is an integrative counsellor and clinical hypnotherapist. His interest in neurodiversity comes from both his professional work and his own family's lived experience, and he writes accessible material that brings research, clinical knowledge and lived experience together for young people and the people supporting them.