Global Mental Health Database (GMHD)- A Feasibility Study

The Global Mental Health Database (GMHD) study is a collaborative effort of Sage Bionetworks, the Wellcome Trust and researchers from UK, India and South Africa. This is an observational, cross sectional, randomized, parallel group multiple arm trial, designed to evaluate the governance, technical, and scientific feasibility of developing a global mental health database of digital data collected from young adults (n=4500) using smart phones in three countries (India, South Africa, and the UK). This project aims to understand whether young adults are willing to share data regarding their mental health status and management with researchers. The overarching goals of the project are to, a) prototype and test mechanisms to successfully empower youth to be involved in data management, b) enable rapid and convenient data collection, c) identify the governance model that youth support to share their data with mental health scientists, and d) understand the factors affecting participation in the databank. To this end, the study has two arms, a quantitative arm and a qualitative arm. In the quantitative arm, participants will be recruited to pilot the GMHD mobile application, which is designed to collect mental health data for a global databank. Thus, through this arm, we will evaluate the technical, regulatory, and scientific feasibility of the databank approach. While, the qualitative arm explores, through deliberative democracy methodology, the attitudes of young adults with regard to data collection and other implementation issues for a databank.