Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: May 15, 2020
Date Accepted: Nov 11, 2020
mHealth for mental health: mobile phone use and readiness among perinatal adolescents in Nigeria
ABSTRACT
Background:
There are several barriers that may hamper adolescent mothers’ utilization of available health interventions for perinatal depression. Innovative treatment approaches are needed to increase their access to mental health care for improved maternal and child health outcomes. Mobile phones have the potential to serve as important conduits to mental health care in Africa. However mobile phone pattern of use and needs of young mothers in Nigeria are unknown.
Objective:
This study sought to document the prevalence of mobile phone use among perinatal adolescents and report their pattern of use, as well as the openness of young mothers to mHealth mental health interventions.
Methods:
We surveyed two hundred and sixty (260) adolescent mothers aged between 16 -19 years in their perinatal or postnatal periods of pregnancies in thirty-three (33) primary health care clinics in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria between 24th February and 23rd March 2020. Respondents were included if they were pregnant with gestation age of >4 weeks, or were with babies of not more than 12 months.
Results:
The total study sample consisted of 260 adolescent mothers with a mean age of 18.4 (SD = 0.88). The majority of the respondents (233, 89.6%) owned mobile phones, 22 (8.5%) had access to phones that belonged to relatives who live in the same house with them (for an average of eighty (80) minutes per day), while 5 (1.9) had access only to public paid phones. On average, respondents reported 15.5 (SD = 2.06) years as the age when they first started using a mobile phone. The majority of respondents (222, 85.4%) use their phones averagely for 45 minutes daily for calls to family members. Facebook was the most used social media site among internet users (122, 83.4%), The majority responded being “interested and “very interested in the use of mobile phones for preventive (250, 96.2%) and treatment (243, 93.5%) information on a mental illness such as depression and “hearing voices." Half of the respondents (126, 50.4%) preferred to receive such information as text messages, while very few (26, 10.4%) wanted, such as videos on phone applications.
Conclusions:
Findings from this study support a broad willingness to engage in mHealth initiatives for the delivery of care for mental illness among perinatal adolescents. A variety of smartphone device supported interventions can be considered as promising in this population because of their high literacy rate. Clinical Trial: NA
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