Developing Digital Mental Health Tools: Examining the Ways That Digital Mental Health Tools Are Produced across Australia and the Philippines

Digital mental health has emerged as a contemporary site for the provision of mental health services, support and stigma reduction. Situated within the emergence of broader global digital health tools, digital mental health promises decreased costs of implementation, reduced barriers to access and ease of navigation of existing complex systems. Yet such promises often obscure the ways that such tools emerge, their logics and the actors involved in their emergence. This work-in-progress paper interrogates and examines the emergence of digital mental health tools across two contexts: Australia and the Philippines. Drawing on interviews with practitioners, designers and policymakers involved in digital mental health we examine how digital mental health tools are narrativized and (re)produce health in practice. Our findings highlight how tools are developed in a field constituted by new(er) actors, including commercial organisations, accrediting bodies, software developers, clinicians, citizens and the state. The technologies themselves respond to varied stakeholder needs, offering support to pathways into care. Users, both people with mental illness and clinicians, are offered a variety of supports to situate and support their needs and engage in forms of care. The findings also point to the ways that key tensions sit between concerns about privacy, data and evidence, and how these interface with plans to provide tailored and personalised care. Further, digital mental health, as our findings show, has multiple, often competing temporal and contextual demands, for example, from being both general to contextual, and being both responsive and slow. We argue that digital health cultures and digital tech cultures entangle, and produce versions of health in dynamic and ongoing ways. We consider the implications of these entanglements for making sense of the production of digital mental health.