## Ministry of Health and Welfare Announces Mental Health Chatbot Service
Ministry of Health and Welfare Announces Mental Health Chatbot Service
Anyone who uses KakaoTalk can easily take a self-examination for depression using their mobile phone.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare announced the launch of this service at the opening ceremony for the Mental Health Chatbot Service held in Seoul on the 9th. This follows the ‘Mental Health Policy Innovation Plan’ announced in December of last year and the proposal for a mental health service accessible to anyone at the People’s Livelihood Forum in March of this year.
This service was created through collaboration between the National Center for Mental Health and Kakao Healthcare. To self-examine your mental health, you must add the KakaoTalk channel ‘National Center for Mental Health.’ Users can conduct a self-examination after entering their gender, age group, and region of residence, and based on the results, they can receive information on nearby mental health-related institutions.
Users can visit the National Mental Health Information Portal for more specific information, which is provided free of charge.
This service begins by offering a self-examination for depression. The depression screening tool PHQ-9 is the same tool currently used in the national health screening, and is being used with the cooperation of Professor Han Chang-soo of Guro Hospital, Korea University, the copyright holder. In the future, screening tools related to other diseases such as anxiety disorder and early psychosis will also be added, based on demand.
Park Min-soo, Second Vice Minister of Health and Welfare, stated, “Mental health can also be managed and improved through routine checkups,” and “The government will do its best to provide services that allow people to examine and take care of their own mental health.”
Kwak Young-sook, director of the National Center for Mental Health, added, “We have prepared mental health services to increase accessibility by utilizing SNS in line with the IT era,” and “The National Center for Mental Health will continue to pursue diverse projects to improve public mental health awareness and prevent mental illness.”
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