Text2whaiora. Researchers: Lillian Ng, Danielle Diamond, Denisse Sanchez, Mike Ang
We know there is no quality of life without good mental health. Our research team are based at Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital Emergency Department, where our clinical staff assess more than 600 people each year with suicidal thoughts, the majority having attempted suicide. Suicide prevention research is one of the most sensitive and challenging areas to work requiring us to harness our clinical knowledge, to use in synergy with sound research methodologies.
Suicide prevention requires multi-system interventions, including digital technologies. Our research, called text2whaiora, involved designing a series of text messages alongside people with lived experience of mental distress, which were sent to service users (known as tangata whaiora, translated as a person seeking wellness) over a period of three months after their contact with mental health services. Our study found that text messages create connection, remind people how they can keep themselves safe and that words have a powerful effect on healing. Our findings emphasised taking into account a person’s culture, reflecting the diversity of Aotearoa New Zealand.
The grant from the Whau Mental Health Research Foundation enabled our research team to acknowledge our study participants, supply mobile phones and credit, collect and analyse data, and disseminate our findings. It has helped us seed precious ideas, spark innovation and realise a vision for our research. It has enabled us to design creative ways to shift more established ways of working in mental health services.
Ahakoa iti, he pounamu. Although small, it is of greenstone. Every funding contribution gives researchers like us an opportunity to test our ideas, gather evidence, evaluate what works, work out what can be improved and apply our intervention in clinical practice. WHAU provided us a springboard to obtain further funding, this time to upscale and evaluate automated text messages via an app which can be accessed directly by our tangata whaiora. We are grateful to WHAU and their sponsors for their gift to our exploratory study.
Article Link: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0306801
