Co-Designing M-Healer: Supporting Lay Practitioner Mental Health Workers in Ghana

Mental health is a vast problem around the globe and is one of the key population health issues in the world today. At any given time, up to 6.8% of the world’s population suffers from a serious mental illness (SMI) such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. The impacts of SMI on a population are especially challenging in low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Mobile healthcare application research is a growing area of research aiming to ameliorate these challenging impacts. In Ghana, a LMIC in West Africa, mental healthcare systems are severely under-resourced and people with SMI often receive care from lay practitioners such as traditional and faith healers rather than trained mental health clinicians. These challenges exist alongside developed wireless infrastructure. In these contexts, mobile applications can substantially increase access to health information. This is the basis for our work developing a mobile health (mHealth) application to support mental health lay practitioners in Ghana. We describe the ways that our principled design research practice is intersecting with local faith-based practices, vernacular expertise and values, and the practicalities of technology adoption in Ghana.