One of our projects is to assess mental health impact of recovery narratives presented online, called NEON (Narrative Experiences ONline). We collected about 800 narratives of lived experience of mental health experienced, directly presented by the person who experienced them. NEON users read/watch/listen to these narratives, and feel that they too can overcome their mental health difficulties. Our impact model suggests that it is important NEON users feel connection with the narrative or narrator. This means that, if you feel some connection with the narrative or narrator, you feel more positive mental health impact.
This is not surprising. Say, you have experienced a high level of anxiety from making a presentation in front of many people. Now 5 narratives are offered to you. The titles suggest 4 of them are about depression, and one is about high anxiety. You can imagine that you may find the anxiety narrative more impactful to you than the 4 depression narratives. So this "connection" is very important for NEON users to experience recovery.
Today mental health is everyone's concern and interest. Many, and diverse people access mental health tools. And they want and need to feel that their concern/interest is included or considered in the tools. If a mental health tool misses that, a certain group of its users will walk away. So mental health tools, including mental health education platforms like NEON, need to include a good amoount of diverse characteristics, so that it is likely to create a connection with its users, leading to better outcomes. The more diverse and inclusive a mental health tool gets, the more likely the tool makes connection with a wide range of people.
In this paper, we suggested some ways to access diversity and inclusivity of collections of mental health recovery narratives. Details of our analysis are found in the paper, but the most relevant to people who are interested in cross-cultural issues may be the definitions of diversity and inclusivity. The definitions of these words are sometimes mixed, or too context-specific that does not allow application. I've searched for literature, and thought about how best these can be expressed. In the paper, we said "Diversity is present when there are a meaningful number of narratives within each subcategory." For example, if we only focus on age, one narrative collection, Collection A, has 10 narratives of which 5 are about children, and the other 5 are about older people, 65+ years old. Collection B has 6 narratives, but 2 are about children, another 2 are about older people, 65+ years old, and the remaining 2 are about working age people, 18-64 years old. Collection B is more diverse than Collection A, because Collection B covers more subcategories of age. So, diversity relates to the spread of presence/existence in subcategories.
We defined inclusivity as "inclusivity is present when the proportion of narratives within each subcategory is similar to the proportion in a wider comparison population at a given time." For example, 2 narrative collections are aimed at the use in one country, where 10% of the population is 65+ years old, 80% is 18-64 years old, and the remaining 10% is young people. Collection C has 10 narratives, of which 5 narratives are about young people, and 5 narratives are about people who are 18-64 years old. Collectin D has 30 narratives, of which 3 are about people who are 65+ years old, 24 are about people who are 18-64 years old, and the remaining 3 are about young people. The propotion of the 3 different age groups in this country is the same as that of Collection D, so Collection D is more inclusive than Collection C. Collection D misses narratives about people who are 65+ years old, so people in this group may feel excluded. It is important to note that a comparison population needs to be identified to assess inclusivity. For example, a health service in Japan can increase its inclusivity by introducing more cases where English-speaking White people used the service, but the same approach will not increase inclusivity of a health service in the UK.
These are differences between diversity and inclusivity. After establishing what each means, we suggested ways to calculate diversity and inclusivity of collections of recovery narratives (link to paper here). We hope the insights there will help advance research and practice in diversity/inclusivity, and recovery.
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