Mental Health Bridges – enabling health literacy skills for people with mental health issues. An online tool created collaboratively by librarians and mental health professionals

Abstract

This poster describes how an interdisciplinary team designed, launched, and maintains a website (mentalhealthbridges.org) that advances the World Health Organization (WHO) mandate to reduce health iniquities through health literacy promotion. The prevalence of mental illness world-wide is 10.7% (Ritchie 2020). Persons with mental illness die 25 years earlier that those in the general population, often due to co-morbidities, demonstrating the need for health literacy education in this population (Parks 2006). Funded by a grant from the US National Library of Medicine, this interactive training tool was designed following a) an extensive literature search to understand how persons with mental illness use the Internet, b) data collection via focus groups of patients, librarians, and mental health professionals and c), a survey geared to the latter group. The site was launched in 2023 and aims to engage and inspire individuals in learning health literacy skills through a variety of interactive features tailored to this population. To maintain sustainability, next steps include the creation of an international advisory board comprised of professionals and individuals with lived experience. As content continues to be added, translation of the site into different languages will be a priority so to engage people within a variety of cultures.