Federal agencies in the United States spend millions of dollars each year developing programmes to help people address mental- and physical-health issues. However, only a
few such initiatives are actually used in the real world. Their uptake might be limited because many scientists don’t include people with mental-health conditions as equal partners with shared decision-making authority during programme development and implementation. Co-producing interventions with community members who have first-hand experience of mental-health issues might help to stop programme manuals from collecting dust on bookshelves — and to get them put into practice.
During my postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, from 2015 to 2018, I partnered with people with mental-health conditions to develop a digital intervention called
PeerTECH. PeerTECH was designed to teach people with such conditions how to address issues related to their mental and physical well-being. The programme includes modules that are designed to be reviewed on a tablet by a peer-support specialist and a person with a mental-health issue. The specialist is someone who has first-hand experience of a mental-health condition and has been trained and certified to provide paid support. A smartphone application was designed to complement the in-person sessions.
Community members provided input into every step of developing the technology in our project — from conception and programme development, to study design and implementation. I worked alongside them as part of our co-production team, and we applied scientific methodology to develop and study the PeerTECH intervention.
