Background Digital mental health is an emerging field that can leverage technology and mobile apps to deliver mental health treatment to populations in areas with limited mental health services. Despite widespread availability of these apps, uptake remains low. Enhanced marketing is necessary to increase public engagement. There is growing recognition that mental health intervention beneficiaries should be engaged in all phases of treatment development, adaptation, and delivery. Crowdsourcing – consulting the public to solve problems and sharing the solutions – can foster community-informed ideas for public health, but has yet been applied to digital mental health marketing. Objective With the goal of engaging potential intervention beneficiaries in digital mental health dissemination, the current project implemented a digital mental health crowdsourcing designathon for Chinese college students in Macao SAR, China and evaluated the feasibility of the contest and the products. The contest asked participants to design marketing packages for Step-by-Step, a scalable WHO digital mental health intervention focusing on depression. Methods Designathon participants, recruited from a global health class, were sorted into teams with balanced areas of expertise. Two judging panels – one of experts in relevant fields and another of Chinese college students – evaluated the marketing packages and selected finalists. The designathon was held in-person over four days and involved debriefing, workshops, a contest, and an awards ceremony. A parallel mixed-methods approach was applied, including qualitative feedback from judges and participants alongside quantitative data on participant satisfaction and depressive symptoms to enrich our understanding of the event. Additionally, based on judges' feedback given to participants, the communication packages of the contest were ranked. Results 49 participants (8 teams of 6–7 members each) were involved in the designathon. Using a cutoff score of 10 on the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), 11.4% of participants had moderate or higher depressive symptoms. All teams successfully produced complete digital mental health marketing packages. Four finalists' packages were selected quantitatively with judges' scores and the top finalist's package was described by judges' comments as simple, thoughtful, and appealing, although not informative enough. Participants were overall satisfied with the designathon, but some mentioned that time was insufficient and that organization/instruction clarity could have been improved. Conclusions The designathon is a novel, feasible strategy to collect crowd input for the dissemination of a mental health intervention. Compared with traditional communication strategies, this bottom-up approach included and engaged potential intervention beneficiaries to take an active role in creating digital mental health marketing communicati...

Background: Filipino migrant workers in Macao are vulnerable to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and addictive behaviours due to trauma histories, postmigration stressors, and access to alcohol and gambling venues. While PTSD addiction comorbidity is well-established in the existing literature, such research among migrant workers is lacking. Objective: The current study investigated differential relations between PTSD symptoms and addictive behaviours in a polytrauma exposed sample of Filipino domestic workers in Macao (SAR), China. Methods: Data were collected from 1375 Filipino migrant workers; data from a subsample of 1200 participants who reported an index traumatic event and PTSD symptoms were used in the analyses. Participants responded to the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5, gambling disorder symptoms checklist from DSM-5, and The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. We estimated a regularized partial correlation network structure of PTSD symptoms and addictive behaviours employing graphical LASSO and extended Bayesian information criterion. Results: PTSD symptoms of arousal and negative emotions had bridge connections with gambling disorder symptoms; while PTSD symptoms of arousal, restricted affect, negative emotions, and emotional reactivity had bridge connections with alcohol misuse. Conclusions: PTSD's arousal and negative emotion symptoms were common in the networks of PTSD and addictive behaviours, while PTSD's restricted affect and emotional reactivity symptoms were unique to the network of PTSD and alcohol misuse. Treatment of the comorbidity of PTSD and addictive behaviours may yield optimal effects when tailored to these symptoms.

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