A Digital Mental Health Approach for Supporting Suicide Prevention: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Suicide is one of the most important public health problems. The implementation of suicide prevention strategies depends on the region, available resources, willingness of stakeholders, and policies. This study considers the strategy of Castilla y León (CyL) in Spain designing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to aid suicide prevention. Evaluating these technologies will allow us to explore the needs of patients with suicidal behavior and with their feedback to improve the proposed technological design oriented to be a complement within clinical practice. A qualitative study has been chosen using a focus group of patients who used this tool during 2022. Applying ICT in a simple, transparent, and safe way to the daily life of patients with suicidal behavior is a challenge and a continuous evolution when facing a follow-up by means of a complementary tool. For this reason, it was necessary to carry out an evaluation with the target users telling us—“Because we (users) know what we feel”—in this type of tools. The evaluation results indicate that patients are satisfied, the application is easy to use (when they are not in crisis), and they make suggestions to improve the proposed design. The main recommendations for patients with suicidal behavior are as follows: (1) a mood tracker that allows them to write down why they feel this way; (2) friendly language; (3) suggest more activities for when they feel bad, such as mindfulness, talking to other people, doing sports activities, and other activities that can motivate them; (4) the need for the application to be more attractive to the user; (5) sociability option (creating a community to share and build support network among them). E-health solutions to prevent suicide are challenging and promising. Setting clear and realistic aims as well as improving user interface (UI), user experience (UX), and acceptability are critical for adoption of such applications. Involving patients in its development and design is an important aspect. We believe that it is possible to develop innovative apps that improve treatment adherence in this field, despite the stigma surrounding suicide. Crisis management is important in this type of patients and its accompaniment, and more attention should be paid to this area.