Community Mental Health Support: A Systemic Perspective | 10 Weeks | 2020
Service Design and Mental Health Support for the Broader Community
Keyword Search | Academic Literature Review | Analysis & Synthesis | Eco-System Map | Future Recommendations
Overview
This project aimed to conduct a research gap investigation in the academic literature related to community-based approaches to Mental Health and highlight the unique contribution and benefits of a service design approach. The challenge was to utilize the best knowledge available to provide insights and enable its replicability and further development by future researchers. This was a group project involving two people and was done in collaboration with another student. I was the main researcher and the author of a technical report.
Why Community-based Mental Health Support?
Initially, when brainstorming various topics, Mental Health stood out to me. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic situation, there was a clear disconnect. People have access to a large amount of online information, communities, resources, and experts, yet the mental health crisis becomes more detrimental daily. Businesses and Governments have taken steps to adapt operationally, yet even with a national rise in depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts, there have been little to no efforts to address the emotional needs of the broader community. The barriers to seeking professional help and the recent spike in mental health problems provide an opportunity to look beyond scaling up professional mental health services and explore a more holistic approach to providing mental health support.
Process | Insights | Opportunities
Identifying the Gap through a series of keyword searches on Google Scholar
Core Articles Reviewed
The definition varies from article to article. We classified it under two categories
Key Pillars of a Community-Based Approach
Intervention Types
An example of Intervention beyond a Clinical Setting
Patterns
What about the people who haven't been diagnosed or require support from time to time rather than continuous treatment?
Understanding what support means to people is imperative
Relying on community leaders and social support places an undue burden on them and leads to lack of long-term maintenance
Social Support research provides key elements to consider when understanding support seeking behaviors
Daily Human mobility research highlights an important aspect of daily life
The Gap
Unique contributions of a Service Design Approach
To start applying the service design approach, these steps are necessary for future exploration
Continued below
The Ecosystem Map
The Ecosystem Map outlines a service design approach to involving everyday services. It also cites various resources and artifacts of the servicescape, like lighting and messaging, that could be explored as they uncover people’s needs and start co-creating solutions.
Further Research
Everyday services play a massive role in people’s lives, and bringing them into the mental health conversation to build emotionally connected encounters is an opportunity to promote social change by impacting the broader community. Service Design provides invaluable tools and methods to co-create and test various ways of scaling up support for the broader community using everyday services. Further research needs to examine whether involving the people within the community (Meroni, 2007) and considering service encounters from a multi-interaction perspective ((Manzini, 2008) as cited in (Pacenti & Sangiorgi, 2010)) improves the scalability and replicability of the community-based model. Another factor, such as motivating everyday services to get involved in this endeavor, should also be studied. The ecosystem map should be evolved as more everyday services are identified and people's support-seeking strategies are understood.
Reflections
This was my first take on a service design project. The most challenging yet interesting part of this project was understanding how to utilize the best available knowledge and utilize existing research to identify opportunities to detach from the narrative. It also helped me understand how to validate secondary research using instrumental, emancipatory, and practical data. In the future, I would love to get the opinion of experts and validate some of the findings.