Expanding Access to Depression Treatment in Kenya

By Green EP, Pearson N, Rajasekharan S, Rauws M, Joerin A, Kwobah E, Musyimi C, Bhat C, Jones RM, Lai Y.

Depression during pregnancy and in the postpartum period is associated with poor outcomes for women and their children. Although effective interventions exist for common mental disorders that occur during pregnancy and the postpartum period, most cases in low- and middle-income countries go untreated because of a lack of trained professionals.

Task-sharing models such as the Thinking Healthy Program have shown great potential in feasibility and efficacy trials as a strategy for expanding access to treatment for depression during pregnancy and in the postpartum period in low-resource settings, but there are significant barriers to scale-up.

This pilot study tests the ability of Healthy Moms, an intervention adapting Thinking Healthy for automated delivery via a mobile phone in conjunction with the artificial intelligence system Tess, to address this gap in assessing Healthy Moms’ perinatal depression intervention using a single-case experimental design with pregnant women and new mothers recruited from public hospitals outside of Nairobi, Kenya.