JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The mental health of international students is a growing concern for education providers, students, and their families. Chinese international students have low rates of help-seeking due to language, stigma, and mental health literacy barriers. Online help-seeking interventions may improve Chinese international student help‐seeking.

Objective:

To describe the development of a mental wellbeing web-app providing personalised feedback and tailored psychoeducation and resources to support help-seeking among Chinese first-language international university students, and test its uptake and engagement.

Methods:

The bilingual MindYourHead web-app contains up to six in-app assessments for various areas of mental health, and users are provided with personalized feedback on symptom severity, tailored psychoeducation on symptoms and interventions, with tailored links to external resources and mental health services. A feasibility study was conducted within a School at the University of Sydney to examine the uptake and engagement of the web-app among Chinese international students, and any demographic characteristics or help-seeking attitudes or intentions that were associated with its engagement.

Results:

A total of 130 Chinese international students signed up to the web-app. There was an uptake of 13.4% (122/908) of the School’s Chinese student enrolment. Majority of participants preferred to use the web-app in Chinese, and had used informal but not formal help for their mental health. There was significant attrition due to a design issue and only 46 students gained access to the full contents of the web-app. Of these, 67.4% (31/46) of participants completed one or more of the in-app mental wellbeing assessments. The most commonly engaged in-app assessments were distress (74.2%; 23/31), stress (54.8%; 17/31), and sleep (48.4; 15/31%), with majority scoring within he moderate or high risk level score range. 10% (9/81) of completed in-app assessments led to clicks to external resources or services. No demographic or help-seeking intentions or attitudes were associated with app engagement.

Conclusions:

There were promising levels of demand, uptake, and engagement with the MindYourHead web-app. The web-app appears to attract students who wished to access mental health information in their native language, those with poor mental health in the past but relied on informal support, and those who were at moderate- or high-risk of poor mental wellbeing. Further research is required to explore ways to improve uptake and engagement, and to test the efficacy of the web-app on Chinese international student’s mental health literacy, stigma, and help seeking.