Mental Health Aid for Refugees
Overview
In Michigan, a diverse array of organizations and programs address the mental health needs of refugees, particularly those from Afghanistan. However, the support structure remains fragmented and lacks a unified approach. Recognizing this, our team initiated a comprehensive research and design project to assess the current landscape of mental health resources for Afghan refugees in Michigan and identify opportunities to enhance and streamline this support system
Project Details
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Role
UX Researcher & Designer
Jan 2024 - May 2024
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Team
Alisha Tran
James Benjey
Sneha Hedge
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Tools
Figma
Canva
Google Suite
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Research Methodologies
Semi-structured Interviews
User Testing
Exploratory Analysis
Card Sorting
Co-design Workshops
Problem Statement
Afghan refugees having experienced various levels of distress and trauma, face significant challenges in seeking and accessing effective mental health aid that is relevant to their unique experiences with trauma. Our goal is to overcome these challenges through a multi-faceted approach that includes fostering an integrated support network that provides culturally sensitive access to empower and enable the community to navigate their mental health journeys.
EARLY STAGES
Objective
Our objective was to conduct research on various mental health applications and tools and deliver an extensive continuity plan for design.
Navigating the early stages
This was an extremely difficult project. When we first started research, we realized just how broad the scope was for mental health and refugees. We first acknowledge that debunking stigma was almost completely out of scope as we were not a part of the community and didn’t fully understand certain beliefs. Secondly ensuring mental health aid through regular Western techniques such as therapy may not be feasible due to the cost and transportation means. Therefore, our first step was talking to Stakeholders.
We talked to various stakeholders to better understand the current situation and what barriers they saw.
The Barriers
After extensive qualitative research and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders we created a graphic to understand all the barriers we learned about.
Developing Empathy
Another large component of being able to embark on this project successfully was taking various empathy classes.
Therefore, we took weekly empathy classes and also interacted with the Afghanistan Refugees every week.
These tasks would be going to workshops, having dinner together, and more.
Ideating a Design Space
Given our limited timeframe and the expansive scope of the project, we recognized that designing a fully-fledged digital space was beyond our immediate capabilities. Instead, we focused our efforts on creating detailed storyboards to conceptualize a potential design that could be developed with proper resources and expertise in the future. As pioneers in addressing this critical need, our primary goal was to deliver a comprehensive continuity plan. This plan captures our ideas and serves as a roadmap for future teams to build upon, ultimately leading to the creation of a robust digital space for refugee mental health support.
Evaluating current tools
We also knew that current tools existed but we wanted to understand why community members weren’t using these tools?
We found four tools that captured mental health aid:
FindHello and FindHelp are both applications that allow refugees to find transportation aid, health aid, and more. Ruh is more catered to actually connecting with therapists, while the last application was Six M’s. This application is paper-based and helps individuals meditate on mental health prompts in a religiously respectful way.
Piecing together the parts
We performed several co-design workshops to observe community members interact with these applications. After they’d interact with them we’d perform semi-structured interviews and have them partake in card sorting. We believed these methods would allow us to better understand their needs and wants. We also wanted to understand why they weren’t utilizing these sorts of tools earlier.
Through these workshops, the community members preferred FindHello the most due to the translation features and integrated resources for refugees. Therefore, knowing this information we created recommendations for a digital space for mental health aid for them.
