Background

Since the start of my graduate program, I knew I wanted to explore an idea at the intersection between mental health and design. But I needed to define an appropriate research scope andI gathered information about contexts like stigma or mindfulness, modalities of delivering information about mental health, etc. The longer my exploration went on, however, the more I was hearing about calls to attention for improved mental health services at Ohio State. This included the reoccurring tragedy of falling deaths on campus  in 2018, the formation of a university task and, most notably, student dissatisfaction for current services. This piqued my curiosity, steering me away from iterating on one idea or solution, and diving deeper into the voices of those who were disillusioned with campus mental health resources and what their varying experiences with this system entailed.

The research area of college student mental health is young and plagued with issues that are still apparent today. Until the early 20th century, colleges and universities largely encouraged students to take physical education.

While not unique to Ohio State, campus mental health resources face many challenges in trying to meet student needs, including long wait times, brief therapy models, and a pervasive shortage of mental health professionals.

Research Objectives

1) Explore the range and variety of experiences within student mental health, from the perspective of current and prospective college students, while detailing common experiences with student mental health resources
2) Extract insights on the sequences of events, choices, emotions, and reflection for each student’s lived experience
3) Analyze each student’s idealized experience and create common ties with the actualized experience (i.e., what occurred in the actual experience for the student to determine what should be present in the ideal experience?)
4) Highlight participatory design research as an approach for creating experiences true to actual users and reflective of their needs in cooperation with the expertise of mental health specialists

Process + Methodology

Participatory design can lead to a variety of different outcomes and outputs that don’t necessitate a reflection of solutions at different levels of an organization the way service design might. Conversely, the value of a service is usually examined and determined after implementation, rather than instilling value throughout the service design process. I set out to combine participatory and service design in this research and assess how one could illuminate one another.

The primary research consisted of two studies. In the first study, 30-minute individual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with students to gain an evaluation of their past experience with Ohio State’s services for the intention of receiving mental health care.

In the second, the same students visually conveyed their ideas in a co-design session for a more ideal experience in the intake process using provided materials. They were asked to create and present a visual persona of someone who is distressed and would benefit from mental health care. Students were then asked to create and present an ideal experience of seeking and receiving mental health treatment by creating a journey map that visualizes the experience of their personas. These methods were chosen as vehicles for students to imagine a better experience with mental health services with respect to another person’s experience.

Results