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This paper offers a reflection of a research process aimed at listening to young children's voices in their everyday school life through a play-based context in a Scottish school. Throughout the research process, the complexity of conducting this research was kept in mind as listening to children's voices presents methodological and conceptual difficulties and tensions. Reflecting on the research process after the data was collected, the process was critiqued using Deleuze-Guattarian ideas. The critique aims at opening and challenging each researcher, allowing them to think-again about the next research project aimed at listening to children's voices.

The research involved an observation study that took place over one week in a primary school in Central Scotland. As part of the educators' approach to play-based pedagogy, children had the opportunity to engage in free play throughout the day. Observations were chosen as the main approach to “capture” children's voices in their natural settings.

The empirical research brought forth two main ideas, that of children as agents, and how children amplify their voices through play. The reflective part offers the possibility of understanding the intensities and forces when conducting such research and the possibilities of engaging with these.

This paper offers a critique of research aimed at listening to children's voices. The aim is not to limit engagement in researching children's voices but to open, or make complex, such processes.

This chapter considers how mental health care is done in and by digital culture in the UK. The author examines how treatments for anxiety and depression operate in today’s technosocial age of smartphone hegemony. Smartphones, the author argues, offer valuable insight into contemporary health and wellbeing precisely because they are emblematic of the neoliberal production logics, knowledge claims and modes of address that structure this moment in digital culture history. The author also shows how this moment is the outcome of key shifts in computing hardware, software, and content. Empirically, this research focusses on mapping Britain’s terrain of smartphone interventions for anxiety and depression. Working from a dataset of 635 apps, the author develops a four-part framework for understanding products and services in this crowded marketplace relative to an app’s (1) intended audience; (2) communicative affordances; (3) business model; and (4) therapeutic approach. Through this framework, the author proposes the notion of me apps to codify the individualised, commercialised, and desocialised mode of address enacted by most of the apps in the dataset. The author shows that the ideology of me apps, and the modes of address they employ, frame mental illness as an individual problem and regard treatment as an individual endeavour. The end of the chapter considers the possibility of an alternative vision for designing technologies of mental wellbeing.