MHD: Mental Health Directory for Nigerian Schools

Abstract

Nigeria has been considered to have the highest number of depression cases in Africa. Young people, such as secondary school students are not exempt. While this is meant to be a serious public health concern, topics around student mental health are still largely ignored. In fact, there exist little or no efforts around the deployment of technological tools to propagate knowledge and create awareness among students in many local communities. In this paper, I propose Mental Health Directory (MHD), a knowledge repository about mental health to help secondary schools better assist teachers and students who might want to learn more about mental illnesses in schools where the internet is not accessible. MHD was developed through the application of information retrieval theories to source and aggregate content from verified online sources. MHD is made publicly available online and offline for schools to utilise for the aforementioned benefit, and as well as a teaching aid, and support for students who might likely be suffering from mental illnesses.