OUR INNOVATIONS

A Digital Toolkit (M-Healer) to Improve Mental Health Care in Ghana

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In West Africa, most people suffering from serious mental illnesses (SMI) like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder receive care from traditional and faith healers in remote settings called “prayer camps”. Specialized mental health providers are scarce in the region, yet the prevalence of traditional healers and clustering of individuals with serious mental illness within the prayer camps offer opportunities to deliver evidence-based treatment to this population.

 

WADMA leaders from the University of Washington and University of Ghana , together with collaborators at BasicNeeds-Ghana (a mental health and development advocacy organization) and traditional healers, developed a mobile application – M-Healer – to aid traditional healers in delivering evidence-based mental health interventions for individuals with SMI.
 

Our multinational research team has developed a two-level intervention package involving a mobile health program which trains healers to deliver high-quality mental health interventions (M-Healer), as well as a fleet of traveling nurses who deliver much-needed medications directly to patients. In an ongoing study, we are evaluating the effectiveness of this intervention to improve mental health and reduce human rights abuses. We will also learn from traditional healers, nurses, patients, and other stakeholders about how to optimize the intervention. Future work will focus on expanding its use in new settings to improve access to effective mental health services throughout the region. This work is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

 

Responding to Adolescent Perinatal Depression with Mobile Health in Nigeria

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Many factors influence the accessibility of health care facilities by perinatal adolescents. Adolescence has distinct developmental challenges, along with self-stigma (i.e., shame relating to getting pregnant at a young age) and public stigma from health care providers and others in the community that can make accessing these services difficult. Effective, flexible, and convenient-to-access interventions are needed to address the health care needs of pregnant adolescents.
 

This project will build on previous work to scale up efforts for perinatal depression for adolescents in primary care in Nigeria. We utilize user-centered design principles to develop a mobile phone application to complement a face-to-face intervention for perinatal adolescents within routine care. Elements from the WHO mhGAP Evidenced-based Guidelines for Management of Perinatal Depression will be adapted for this work. This work is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.