Megan Jones Bell
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2020
last heard Nov 2020
Megan Jones Bell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And hi, I'm Megan Jones Bell.
Thank you, Mackenzie, Erica, Kana, and the rest of the organizers.
I am a clinical psychologist by training.
Lived experiences got me into that business in the first place and devoted the first chapter of my career to
designing and evaluating digital mental health interventions really across the age continuum, but with a large focus on youth.
I realized that nothing I developed in academia was actually getting into the hands of the people for whom I was designing it, so I decided to start a company.
It was one of the first coached mental health offerings since
been absorbed into a number of other digital apps.
And now I'm the chief strategy and science officer of Headspace, which is the world's leading mindfulness app.
And I think what has been a barrier is that many of the technologies that we have available for behavioral health have not been designed specifically for youth.
They've been kind of adapted down for children and younger people, which is not really the appropriate way of designing an intervention.
And then, you know, they've also not been designed for diverse populations.
We over recent months have seen a rise in the number of meditation apps designed by and for people of color.
I think if you're targeting populations who don't feel seen by the traditional
health care system, they don't trust it, they don't see themselves reflected in it, that particularly when we're trying to close that divide with technology, we really need to be designing those interventions with those people in mind.
I wanted to build on Victor's point about peer support, because I think if you look at the evidence on global mental health,
There's very encouraging results showing that peer support combined with an evidence-based intervention, ideally delivered over text message so that you're not using data plans that don't exist, can really be effective, particularly for lower acuity conditions, or better yet, intervening upstream.
I love, Erica, the qualification of evidence-based services because that's something I spend a lot of time thinking about is, you know, the opportunity that we have with digital behavioral health technology is to close that access gap.
I think in part that is a bit conditional on the digital divide.
being adequately addressed, which is why I think while that's a work in progress, making sure that we're developing the simplest technology that is the most ubiquitous as a delivery mechanism so that we can get around those cost barriers.
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