None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Recent unemployment represents a significant risk factor for the development of mental health problems, such as depression, and suicidal behaviour. This relationship may be affected by age and gender with working age males at particular risk. Interventions which target recently unemployed working age males to reduce mental health stigma and improve mental health literacy skills may be effective in this population to reduce depression symptomatology and suicidal ideation. The Contact&Connect intervention will be a series of digital ‘brief contact interventions’ (BCIs) with male unemployed construction workers aged 30-64 years. BCIs are defined a structured contacts using a variety of modalities that seek to provide support, education and maintain long-term contact with individuals. The BCIs will be delivered to workers’ smartphones via SMS rich text messages. These messages will include embedded hyperlinks to other digital resources the project will make available on the internet, including microsites, videos, and digital wallet cards. In terms of stigma reduction, the intervention will largely be educational. Content will flow across three main themes: de-bunking myths and stereotypes, normalisation, and empowerment.
Interventions
Contact&Connect is a multimedia-based package of brief contact interventions (BCIs). These will be delivered to participants as rich text messages with embedded hyperlinks to microsites, videos, electronic passbooks, and digital wallet cards that provide basic information to improve mental health literacy and encouragement to connect socially with others through the use of “reward tokens”. Participants will also be provided with an electronic passbook containing information on emergency contacts
Contact&Connect is a multimedia-based package of brief contact interventions (BCIs). These will be delivered to participants as rich text messages with embedded hyperlinks to microsites, videos, electronic passbooks, and digital wallet cards that provide basic information to improve mental health literacy and encouragement to connect socially with others through the use of “reward tokens”. Participants will also be provided with an electronic passbook containing information on emergency contacts. Although content will be developed through qualitative focus group sessions with members of the construction industry and in collaboration with our partner organisation, Incolink, to ensure the resources are appropriate and acceptable to participants, BCIs will be delivered as structured contacts that seek to provide support, education and maintain long-term contact with individuals. The intervention will largely be educational with content flowing across three main themes: de-bunking myths and stereotypes, normalisation, and empowerment. The Contact&Connect intervention will be delivered over six weeks. Participants receive two BCIs in the first week, then receive one a week for five weeks. Monitored usage of the embedded hyperlinks will be used to monitor adherence throughout the intervention.
Sponsors
Deakin University.
Study design
Allocation
Randomised controlled trial
Intervention model
Parallel
Primary purpose
Prevention
Masking
Blinded (masking used) (Investigator, Outcomes Assessor)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
Construction workers who are currently unemployed and own a smart phone with enabled internet connectivity and adequate data download capacity are eligible. Those who are eligible are registered with Incolink (a social welfare trustee company that provides support to unemployed members of the construction industry). The intervention is primarily aimed at males. However, because of strong interest from females, these participants are also included and analyzed separately in sensitivity analysis.
Exclusion criteria
Those excluded from the study were people not in possession of a smart phone with enabled internet connectivity with adequate data download capacity, and those with insufficient English language ability. We will analyse females as a sensitivity analyses, as we found number of them were interested in taking part in the study. We did not exclude any construction worker on the basis of age
Outcome results
None listed