Abstract

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Abstract:

Adolescent pregnancy and motherhood pose significant risks to girls’ mental health. However, few interventions to promote good mental health and prevent mental health conditions during this time, with most evaluated in high-income countries. Equitable partnership with young people and their communities in the development of youth-focused interventions is vital to the development of interventions that are sustainable at scale.

Over a four-year period, the INSPIRE (Innovative approaches to adolescent perinatal wellbeing) project blended human-centred design, systems thinking and implementation science methods to co-design and test an adolescent perinatal mental health intervention in Kenya and Mozambique. Over 200 adolescents, service providers, family members and community influencers took part in the co-design process.

The resulting Thriving Mamas programme (TMP) is a nine-session antenatal course which supports girls to look after themselves and their babies, strengthen life skills and plan for the future. Pilot testing found TMP to be highly feasible, appropriate and acceptable to all participants. Adolescents receiving the intervention were significantly more likely to see a reduction in mental health symptoms compared to their peers. Participants described TMP as giving them hope for their futures and the futures of their babies.

INSPIRE has demonstrated that co-production approaches can be successfully used to develop mental health interventions. The benefits and challenges of co-designing in this context will be discussed with thoughts for future work and practice.

The talk will end with an audience Q&A.

Speaker bio:

Dr Tatiana Taylor Salisbury is Reader in Global Mental Health and Design at King’s College London (KCL). She is Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health at KCL and Co-Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health, a collaboration between KCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Her work blends human-centred design, systems thinking and implementation science to develop development of scalable and sustainable solutions to improve mental health outcomes.

Tatiana’s other interests include integrating mental health into physical health services, operationalising good quality mental health care, and engaging communities in intervention development and service delivery.