This project aims to promote mental wellbeing by developing and evaluating a digitalised tool, Capture My Mood (CMM), as a means for women to self-monitor their mental wellbeing during pregnancy and early parenting. CMM incorporates a visual scale that aligns with the five core concepts of the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS), a validated questionnaire used to ascertain population mental wellbeing (Stewart Brown et al. 2009). CMM aims to:
- encourage and empower women to determine their own state of mental wellbeing across a continuum rather than a single point in time
- offer a de-medicalised approach and minimise stigma associated with screening for depression
- connect mothers with designated support people, provide educational resources and pathways for support and services as required
- enable the integration into maternity care to facilitate discussion on mental wellbeing during pregnancy and early motherhood
- be useful across a wide population and could be utilized as a self-monitoring tool in a variety of contexts such as fathers.
A pilot feasibility study established correlation between a paper-based version of the CMM tool and the WEMWBS (McKellar et al. 2017) with scores (5-25) which indicate levels of wellbeing as aligned with the WEMWBS (i.e. very low, low, average, above average). Further, the participants from the pilot study, women who had recently given birth, recommended the development of a digital version of the tool. Therefore, the current stage of the project aims to develop a digital version of the CMM tool. For this a co-design approach will be taken in which end-users, particularly women, as well as clinicians (midwives and representatives from perinatal mental health services), researchers and IT experts will be engaged to develop, implement and evaluate a prototype digital tool for women to monitor their own wellbeing.
Chief Investigator: Dr Lois Kellar.
