Understanding and Facilitating Mental Health Help-Seeking of Young Adults: A Socio-technical Ecosystem Framework
Jiaying Liu, Yan Zhang
TL;DR
This study investigates how young adults navigate a broad ecosystem of mental health resources, addressing the gap that prior work often focuses on single tools. Through 18 in-depth interviews and guided by the Social Ecological Theory, it introduces the Socio-technical Ecosystem Framework, comprising four resource levels, two types of support systems, three support mechanisms, and multiple pathways to care. The findings reveal barriers at each level and show that multi-resource configurations offer greater resilience, while single-resource patterns are more common among participants with economic constraints. The authors translate these insights into design implications for mental health technologies aimed at enhancing care-giving, care-mediating, and care-outreaching across technological, interpersonal, community, and societal levels, with potential to improve accessibility and long-term engagement.
Abstract
Prior research on young adults' mental health help-seeking mostly focuses on one particular resource such as a mobile app or digital platform, paying less attention to their lived experiences interacting with the ecosystem of resources. We conducted in-depth interviews with 18 participants about their help-seeking and non-help-seeking experiences. Guided by Social Ecological Theory, we proposed a Socio-technical Ecosystem Framework for mental health care, consisting of four levels of resources, including technological-, interpersonal-, community-, and societal level resources. Using this framework, we identified two types of support systems for help-seeking, single-resource support system and multi-resource support system. These resources support young adults' help-seeking via three mechanisms, \textit{care-giving}, \textit{care-mediating}, and \textit{care-outreaching}, forming various pathways to care. We then pointed out the barriers to resource use at each level and the general challenges in finding a support system. Our findings contributed to a conceptual framework to categorize mental health care. It also serves as a practical framework to identify challenges in the pathways to care and discover design implications.