"Like Shock Absorbers": Understanding the Human Infrastructures of Technology-Mediated Mental Health Support

Pendse, Sachin; Lalani, Faisal; Choudhury, Munmun De; Sharma, Amit; Kumar, Neha

doi:10.1145/3313831.3376465

Cited by 30 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Given the higher chances of facing negative mental health consequences, self‐care for practitioners becomes essential in such circumstances (Norcross & Phillips, 2020), which is applicable to the current pandemic as well. Some of these self‐care strategies include organisational training, daily practices such as debriefings and post‐calls and supportive networks facilitated during supervision (Hunter & Schofield, 2006; Pendse et al., 2020; Sundram et al, 2018). Thus, while it is important to acknowledge the increased need for helpline services during the COVID‐19 pandemic, it is also important to stress the need to take care of practitioners who provide these services.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychosocial response to COVID‐19 pandemic in India: Helpline counsellors’ experiences and perspectives

Joshi

Tammana

Babre

et al. 2020

Couns and Psychother Res

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The COVID‐19 pandemic presents a threat to physical and psychosocial health of individuals. In lieu of the subsequent lockdown and containment measures, helpline counselling becomes a viable method of accessing psychosocial services during the pandemic. The present paper describes experiences of counsellors working with a special COVID‐19 counselling helpline initiated by iCALL, a national‐level technology‐assisted counselling service of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India, which aims to address the psychosocial impact of the pandemic and the lockdown. The paper is based on two focus group interviews held with 11 counsellors during the initial two months of the helpline's functioning. Findings of the study highlight the diverse profile of the callers, with individuals belonging to different strata of society and to marginalised communities. The nature of concerns presented by the callers were often a mix of psychological, relational and practical issues. The resultant distress emanated from an interplay of these factors with the relational contexts, their social locations and social structures the individuals were embedded in. This highlighted the need for conceptualising and responding from a psychosocial lens, whereby interventions involved traditional counselling approaches and strategies for addressing determinants of distress by connecting callers to required ground‐level resources. Counsellors’ engagement with this process impacted their professional and personal selves, necessitating the need for structured and continuous training, supervision and support. At a larger level, the counsellors’ narratives asserted the need for adopting a psychosocial paradigm for conceptualising and addressing mental health concerns in India.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychosocial response to COVID‐19 pandemic in India: Helpline counsellors’ experiences and perspectives

Joshi

Tammana

Babre

et al. 2020

Couns and Psychother Res

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“…Underlying this potential is thus the ability of social media data to classify the state and needs of each individual, and use that information to tailor a customized response. Precedents for such a system are abound as seen in several prior work [27][28][29][30][31]37,[87][88][89].…”

Section: Principal Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is already a digital divide in terms of social media use where the population is skewed towards young adults and white-collar workers. Further, technology and social media could be a luxury to marginalized and underprivileged populations, and any sort of technology-driven support and assistance will disproportionately affect different individuals based on technology use [88]. Similarly, a single platform cannot provide a complete picture; different platforms (such as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, instant messaging services) have unique design strengths and weaknesses both in terms of their affordances, as well as who uses them.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media Reveals Psychosocial Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Saha

Torous

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Background: The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused several disruptions in personal and collective lives worldwide. The uncertainties surrounding the pandemic have also led to multi-faceted mental health concerns, which can be exacerbated with precautionary measures such as social distancing and self-quarantining, as well as societal impacts such as economic downturn and job loss. Despite noting this as a mental health tsunami, the psychological effects of the COVID-19 crisis remains unexplored at scale. Consequently, public health stakeholders are currently limited in identifying ways to provide timely and tailored support during these circumstances. Objective: Our work aims to provide insights regarding people's psychosocial concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic by leveraging social media data. We aim to study the temporal and linguistic changes in symptomatic mental health and support-seeking expressions in the pandemic context. Methods: We obtain 60M Twitter streaming posts originating from the U.S. from March, 24 to May, 25, 2020, and compare these with 40M posts from a comparable period in 2019 to causally attribute the effect of COVID-19 on people's social media self-disclosure. Using these datasets, we study people's self-disclosure on social media in terms of symptomatic mental health concerns and expressions seeking support. We employ transfer learning classifiers that identify the social media language indicative of mental health outcomes (anxiety, depression, stress, and suicidal ideation) and support (emotional and informational support). We then examine the changes in psychosocial expressions over time and language, comparing the 2020 and 2019 datasets. Results: We find that all of the examined psychosocial expressions have significantly increased during the COVID-19 crisis, mental health symptomatic expressions have increased by ~14%, and support seeking expressions have increased by 5%, both thematically related to COVID-19. We also observe a steady decline and eventual plateauing in these expressions during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have been due to habituation or due to supportive policy measures enacted during this period. Our language analyses highlight that people express concerns that are contextually related to the COVID-19 crisis. Conclusions: We studied the psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 crisis by using social media data from 2020, finding that people's mental health symptomatic and support-seeking expressions significantly increased during the COVID-19 period as compared to similar data from 2019. However, this effect gradually lessened over time, suggesting that people adapted to the circumstances and their new normal. Our linguistic analyses revealed that people expressed mental health concerns regarding personal and professional challenges, healthcare and precautionary measures, and pandemic-related awareness. This work shows the potential to provide insights to mental healthcare and stakeholders and policymakers in planning and implementing measures to mitigate mental health risks amidst the health crisis.

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“…This feedback can then be considered to tailor interventions and implementation strategies to be acceptable or appropriate, two key determinants of implementation success [ 15 ]. There has been increased application of HCD to psychosocial [ 26 ] and global health [ 27 ] intervention development and implementation [ 28 , 29 ]; however, HCD is just beginning to be applied to global mental health (see [ 30 ] for an example). HCD may be particularly useful for complex service delivery environments, where resource availability is dynamic and where interventions require adaptation to meet systems, resource, and other contextual specificities.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying human-centered design to maximize acceptability, feasibility, and usability of mobile technology supervision in Kenya: a mixed methods pilot study protocol

Triplett

Munson

Mbwayo

et al. 2021

Implement Sci Commun

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Background Although research continues to support task-shifting as an effective model of delivering evidence-based practices (EBPs), little scholarship has focused how to scale up and sustain task-shifting in low- and middle-income countries, including how to sustainably supervise lay counselors. Ongoing supervision is critical to ensure EBPs are delivered with fidelity; however, the resources and expertise required to provide ongoing supervision may limit the potential to scale up and sustain task shifting. Opportunities may exist to leverage mobile technology to replace or supplement in-person supervision in low-resource contexts, but contextual variables, such as network connectivity and lay counselor preferences surrounding mobile technology, must be examined and considered when designing and implementing mobile technology supervision. Methods This study builds from an existing randomized trial in Kenya, wherein teachers and community health volunteers have been trained to provide trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy as lay counselors. The study will use an iterative and mixed methods approach, with qualitative interviews and a Human-Centered Design (HCD) workshop informing a non-randomized pilot trial. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with lay counselors and supervisors to understand how mobile technology is currently being used for supervision and determine the barriers and facilitators to mobile technology supervision. Data from these interviews will inform an HCD workshop, where lay counselors and supervisors “re-design” supervision to most effectively leverage mobile technology. Workshop participants will also participate in focus groups to gather perceptions on the use of HCD techniques. The final outcome of the workshop will be a set of refined workflows, which will be tested in a mixed method, nonrandomized pilot with newly trained lay counselors and existing supervisors. The pilot trial will evaluate the acceptability, feasibility, and usability of mobile technology supervision through self-report questionnaires as well as perceptions of effectiveness through qualitative interviews with a subset of lay counselors and all supervisors. Discussion This study will provide a launching point for future research on supervision and methods to engage stakeholders to design and tailor interventions and implementation supports to fit low-resourced contexts. Trial registration The parent trial from which this study builds was registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on August 9, 2017 (NCT03243396).

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"Like Shock Absorbers": Understanding the Human Infrastructures of Technology-Mediated Mental Health Support

Cited by 30 publications

References 42 publications

Psychosocial response to COVID‐19 pandemic in India: Helpline counsellors’ experiences and perspectives

Psychosocial response to COVID‐19 pandemic in India: Helpline counsellors’ experiences and perspectives

Social Media Reveals Psychosocial Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Applying human-centered design to maximize acceptability, feasibility, and usability of mobile technology supervision in Kenya: a mixed methods pilot study protocol

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