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Experience of Students in Using Online Mental Health Interventions: A Qualitative Study

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ICT for Health, Accessibility and Wellbeing (IHAW 2022)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1799))

Abstract

Online mental health interventions have been posited as a way to reduce the mental health treatment gap among students in higher education. The effectiveness of these interventions is often limited by low user adherence. A potential solution is to improve user adherence by producing user-centred interventions.

A total of 452 students from University College Cork, Ireland participated in the survey, “Tell us About Your Mental Health Post-COVID-19”. The survey examined students’ mental health over the past year, their use of technological supports, their use of mental health support services and their ratings of mental health support services used.

This study explores students’ experiences with technological support. The thematic analysis of 138 open-ended responses produced seven main themes: 1) Appeal 2) Barriers to Use 3) Discovery 4) Drawbacks 5) Purpose 6) Reasons for Stopping and 7) Usage Patterns. The results of this study revealed students’ openness to using online mental health resources. It also revealed the barriers and facilitators to their use of these resources. Finally, based on our findings, we provide recommendations to researchers/designers developing online mental health interventions for university students. Some of these recommendations were to ensure safety in online communities, provide good user interfaces, support students in crises and improve the accessibility of online resources to students with learning disabilities.

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Funding

This publication has emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number 12/RC/2289-P2 which is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and IT, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Olugbenga Oti & Ian Pitt

  2. The Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Claudette Pretorius

Authors
  1. Olugbenga Oti
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  2. Claudette Pretorius
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  3. Ian Pitt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Olugbenga Oti .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    George Angelos Papadopoulos

  2. Frederick University, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Achilleas Achilleos

  3. Université de Rouen-Normandie, Mont Saint Aignan, France

    Edwige Pissaloux

  4. Universidad Panamericana, Aguascalientes, Mexico

    Ramiro Velázquez

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Oti, O., Pretorius, C., Pitt, I. (2023). Experience of Students in Using Online Mental Health Interventions: A Qualitative Study. In: Papadopoulos, G.A., Achilleos, A., Pissaloux, E., Velázquez, R. (eds) ICT for Health, Accessibility and Wellbeing. IHAW 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1799. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29548-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29548-5_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-29547-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-29548-5

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