“When you become pregnant, you receive Mieux-vivre, a bible that answers all the questions of new parents. When you buy a car, the salesman takes you around the garage and in the glove compartment, you have the manual. But in mental health, that doesn’t exist. »
Geneviève Lessard, 45, wears many hats. She is a former police officer. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic shock after a long journey through the healthcare system. She is a peer support worker. And in recent years, she has been the “co-designer” of a brand new application that a team of researchers from UQAM have been working on for three years: Mentallys.
Mentallys is the creation of Stéphane Vial, professor of interaction design at UQAM. He presented the image and concept of Mentallys this week to around a hundred organizations. It is a research-innovation project, “a bit like a start-up hidden at the university”, financed by nearly 1 million in three years by public research funds. A major project, therefore, which involved around forty students, co-researchers and companies. Its aim: to become THE digital one-stop shop for access to mental health care and self-care in Quebec. The first version of the application will be delivered in the spring.
Mentallys, which focuses on a simple and fluid interface, was developed using “co-design”, therefore with the constant contribution of professionals, patient partners and peer helpers like Geneviève Lessard, consulted throughout the project. “We do not bring anything that has not been proposed and validated by the people who will use it,” summarizes Professor Stéphane Vial, also qualified as a psychologist, in France.
The application will have three components: reception and guidance (which will include explanatory videos on mental health and the possibility of chatting with a peer helper); a geographic map (to identify all the resources around you, public, private and community) and interaction with the desired service – peer helper or CLSC worker. Stakeholders could use Mentallys to contact people, transmit documents, make automatic appointment reminders, or even to start a chat, lists Stéphane Vial. Without going into clinical detail, Mentallys could also include a brief history of a person’s care journey.
Access to care is complicated. “The care pathways are long, they are labyrinthine, they are discouraging,” summarizes Professor Stéphane Vial. Yes, he says, it is woefully under-resourced, but that is not the only problem. “If, tomorrow morning, you double your resources, there are other issues that do not change: organizational and software complexity,” says Stéphane Vial, who emphasizes that, in a CIUSSS, there are between 400 and 900 pieces of software. on average in Quebec. “You go to see your family doctor, he directs you to the CLSC access desk, and your request is caught in an administrative and software pipeline in which it progresses slowly. »
Talk to Geneviève Lessard. It took him eight years between his first traumatic shock, at work, and his diagnosis of post-traumatic shock syndrome, in 2018. “I knocked on lots of doors, in the public, in the private sector, but no one targeted the right thing,” she says. A delay of one year to see a psychiatrist, another year to see a second one, another one to two years of waiting for a support group… His story gives you headaches.
In Stéphane Vial’s vision, Mentallys would one day be managed by a company with a social vocation, with specific statutes guaranteeing responsible management. The issue of privacy protection has been “at the heart of concerns since day one,” assures the professor. The application, he says, will collect a minimum of data (“last name, first name, telephone, email”) and will not do any electronic tracking and will not include any advertising. “We will use the recognized secure Cloud service validated by the Ministry of Health,” says Stéphane Vial, who hopes that Mentallys will ultimately become a service offered free of charge to the entire population thanks to financial support from the State.
