NGUGI KARIUKI
Mental health illnesses have become extremely common in the world in our recent times. Most governments are striving to ensure citizens do not have to go through the anguish that comes with it. At its peak, if mental illnesses are not checked they could lead to someone committing suicide, especially amongst the youth. The problem that exists however is that sometimes accessing mental health management services is very expensive and the counsellors who are entrusted with this task are mostly not accessible to people who don’t have money. Apart from that, there has been so much stigmatization in our country and in Africa, especially among men.
The objective of the study was to come up with a mental health innovation application, whose objective is utilization of information technology to help manage this mental health crisis, by filling the gap between the mental health patient and services such as counselling as well as having access to other mental health management services such as relaxing music from the application and producing to do lists that will help the patient have a better state of mind. With ICT adoption, the users/patients can be able to gain access to blog articles from mental health experts as well as other users who were going through a hard time and what they did to overcome it.
The literature review that exists will show that more application developers have made an effort to curb this enigma by developing solutions geared towards this objective. This is in a bid to curb the existing challenges in seeking mental health illnesses that include high expenses, privacy issues as well as social stigma. The existing systems were however found to mostly revolve around counseling alone, which was still insufficient in management of mental health issues.
With best practice in ICT utilization, the methodology of the research was conducted by random sampling and was conducted in the context of the United States International University-Africa, where surveys and questionnaires were used and the data analyzed using excel and google forms. The greatest finding was that most respondents preferred the medical access innovation application majorly due to the fact that it was not only a tool to access counselors, but that it offered multiple mental health management platforms such as blogs, to-do list, meditation and chatting with other people.
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