article · Wellcome Open Research
Mental health data across Africa, and South Africa specifically, remain fragmented due to the use of divergent measurement tools across separate institutions and studies. This fragmentation impedes data comparison, synthesised insights, and secondary research into anxiety and depression. To address this, the PAMHoYA project establishes an open-access data discovery and harmonisation platform focused on publicly available mental health information for young people aged 15 to 24 years. Working alongside academics, civil society, government health officials, and individuals with lived experience, the initiative maps existing metadata sources and uses Natural Language Processing to retrospectively harmonise varied assessment instruments. The resulting harmonised datasets will be hosted in an open repository, enabling secondary analysis, guiding subnational and national health estimates, and strengthening evidence-informed public health policy.
Inconsistent health data make it difficult for policymakers and providers to understand youth mental health trends or allocate resources effectively. By bringing scattered datasets together and harmonising diverse measurement tools into an open repository, this work can help public health authorities and researchers better track anxiety and depression, ultimately leading to more responsive youth mental health services.
This work is an early-stage protocol focused on an open-access public health infrastructure rather than a commercial product. Its primary end users are academic researchers, civil society, and public health authorities such as the National Department of Health. While it demonstrates applications of Natural Language Processing for health data harmonisation, the abstract indicates no direct commercialisation pathway.
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Africa’s mental health information landscape is widely recognised as fragmented, limiting planning, budgeting, and service delivery. In South Africa, this fragmentation is reflected in the collection of depression and anxiety data across multiple institutions and studies, using different instruments, constraining comparability, synthesis, and secondary use. This protocol describes the co-development of an open-access, user-oriented mental health data discovery platform and harmonisation of mental health measures for young people in South Africa (PAMHoYA). The platform is designed to improve the discoverability and comparability of existing mental health data for young people aged 15–24 years, using publicly available South African sources. Through a process of co-development, we will work with lived experience experts of common mental health disorders, researchers including academics, the National Department of Health, and civil society to a) map and integrate available metadata sources in South Africa containing information on depressive and anxiety symptoms; b) design the mental health data search platform; c) retrospectively harmonise mental health measures using Natural Language Processing; and d) make harmonised datasets openly accessible via a data repository. The platform aims to facilitate data findability and instrument metadata harmonisation thereby enabling secondary analysis of large mental health datasets, supporting national and subnational estimates, and identifying gaps in the current mental health data. This has the potential to strengthen mental health research, surveillance, and evidence-informed policy in South Africa. The protocol outlines the platform’s design, stakeholder engagement approach, and planned evaluation.
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DOI: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.27229.1
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