Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Nov 20, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 10, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A New Podcast to Reduce Stigma Against People Living with Complex Mental Health Issues: A Co-Design Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
‘Mental illness stigma’ refers to damaging stereotypes and emotional responses around the experience of mental health issues. Media-based interventions have potential to reduce the public’s stigmatising attitudes through improving mental health literacy, emotional appeal, and intimacy of address. As audio-based media, podcasts show potential for reducing stigma, but it is unclear what features could make such a podcast effective or engaging.
Objective:
This study aimed to design a new podcast which aspires to reduce listeners’ stigmatising attitudes, via co-design with people with direct experience of stigma and discrimination and other target audience members.
Methods:
This study was adapted from Experience-Based Co-Design methodology. The first part, Information Gathering, involved an online mixed methods survey with 629 Australian podcast listeners. Then, a series of four Zoom focus groups were held with a purposive sample of 25 participants to explore potential benefits and challenges of the podcast format. Focus group participants included people with lived experience of complex mental health issues, media and communications professionals, healthcare professionals, and people with an interest in workplace mental health. The second part, Co-Design, constituted three meetings of a Co-Design Committee, with 10 participants drawn from the focus groups, to design the podcast using brainstorming and decision-making activities.
Results:
Most survey respondents (85.3%) indicated willingness to listen to a podcast about experiences of mental illness stigma; participants indicated preference for semi-structured episodes, and a mixture of light and serious content. Focus group participants identified potential challenges with appealing to listeners, making the content emotionally resonant and engaging, and translation to listeners’ attitude change. The Co-Design Committee worked to achieve consensus on the focus of individual episodes (domains where stigma and discrimination are common, such as workplaces and healthcare settings), the structure of episode storyboards that centralise lived experience narratives, and content principles (such as using plain language, having clear calls to action, and providing listener resources).
Conclusions:
The co-design process allowed for in-depth discussion around strengths and limitations of such a podcast according to different target audience members. The Co-Design Committee designed key elements of a podcast that has potential to minimise limitations of the format while embracing the benefits of podcast-based storytelling. Once produced, the podcast will be evaluated for its impact on attitude change.
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