Design e tecnologia como intervenção e suporte à saúde mental de universitários da Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM)

Abstract

The vast majority of university students are at a stage prone to developing mental disorders, and with the brazilian students isn’t different. At the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) students constantly suffer from mental health, being the anxiety one of the main causes. Despite the free assistance given to students, many remain untreated, due to the precariousness of these systems, which most of the time are unable to treat the high demand. Thus, it is necessary to create new ways to help these university students who remain untreated, thus observing the risk of retention and school dropout. Therefore, the main objective of this dissertation is to develop an interface for a mobile application that helps treat anxiety in university students at UFAM, Campus Manaus headquarters. For this, the Design Thinking Methodology was used, and numerous design tools in order to explore the best way to develop this innovation. Initially, a Systematic Literature Review was carried out to bring it closer to the research problem, where the technological interventions used to assist in the mental health treatment of university students were analyzed. Through this stage, there was a greater proximity to several instruments, most of them from psychology, and different psychological approaches such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). From this, the CBT approach was defined as guiding the psychological part of the project, and the instruments that would be applied in future questionnaires. Then, it was decided to first carry out a semi-structured interview with the specialists, which allowed a broad view of the context of students' illness due to anxiety, and a deficient system with inability to care for the entire sick population. After this discovery, 3 questionnaires were applied that made it possible to deepen the severity of illness due to anxiety in this population, as well as the causes behind the lack of access to psychological assistance. Then, 2 focus groups were made with university students with severe or moderate anxiety to identify the institutional factors that could be linked to this anxiety, making it possible through this step to define which CBT approach tools should be applied in the application interface. Then, in the projective stage, interfaces were made based on the users' needs, applying instruments that could help them to reduce anxiety and strengthen self-esteem. The validation of the prototype was carried out with the target audience, where from the results, it was possible to notice that they were very receptive to this intervention, classifying it as useful and easy to use.