Why was MindSkiller® Developed?

MindSkiller was designed to help fill gaps in existing mental health services by employing 3 innovative digital services that align with Australia’s National Digital Health Strategy and contemporary specialist healthcare values, models and research.

There are 3 core design features that have enabled MindSkiller to fill the gaps:

A broad-based mental health literacy service with all the key ingredients

  • Trans-diagnostic: addresses any diagnosis
    Explaining the overlap between ‘mental disorders’, ‘mental health’ and ‘mental fitness’
  • Trans-modal: addresses any treatment
    Covering biological, psychological and social treatment modalities used by different types of mental health clinicians, including medications, psychotherapies and lifestyle factors
  • Trans-cultural: addresses any type of user
    Uses a visual theme-based ‘language’ that’s understandable to laypeople, general practitioners, psychiatrists and all types of psychotherapists

Practical psychiatrist-designed content and clinical support that recognises

  • Stages of mental health: Recovery, Resilience and Mental Fitness
  • Levels of severity: Mild, moderate and severe disorders, symptoms or features
  • Types of consumers, providers and settings: Medical practitioner (general practitioner or specialist) or allied health (psychologist, social worker or nurse), inpatient or outpatient, public or private

Person-centred care that enables the user to better coordinate their own healthcare

  • Gives the user choice about what they want out of the services: Self-Help, training for MindSkiller® accreditation, learning how to Help-Seek, referring patients or clients for additional education and support
  • Help-Seekers experience what it is like to communicate with Help-Providers: Instantly available, real-time, brief episodes of support and guidance to improve mental health literacy
  • Help-Seekers discover the principles of best-practice models of care: MindSkiller presents person-centred, trauma-informed, biopsychosocial, multidisciplinary, shared, blended, stepped and staged care principles
 
MindSkiller has been adapted from a prototype tested in the field over many years with hundreds of outpatients and inpatients in clinical practice. It is not an academic study recruiting participants into research  but built specifically to take advantage of digital technologies and to provide effective and efficient supplementary, complementary and practical clinical support.