Design Opportunities for Mental Health Peer Support Technologies

Abstract

Barriers to accessing mental health care leave the majority of people with mental illnesses without professional care. Peer support has been shown to address gaps in care, and could scale to wider audiences through technology. But technology design for mental health peer support lags far behind tools for individuals and clinicians. To identify opportunities for design, we interviewed 18 people with a diverse range of mental illnesses about their use of technology for peer support, and invited them to design technologies that could improve their experience of peer support. We found that technology could enhance peer support for mental health by: (1) matching peers on similarities beyond diagnosis; (2) enhancing accessibility; and (3) proactively mitigating risk through training and intervention. We discuss these findings in the context of the broad peer support literature, and present design opportunities for making mental health peer support tools empowering, accessible, and safe.