Experiencing schizophrenia symptoms through augmented reality: from assessing students needs to prototyping a simulation

International audience ; Background: The stigma of schizophrenia, in addition to being present among mental health professionals (for a review see Valery and Prouteau, 2020), is already present among students (Sideli et al., 2021) and even associated with the level of clinical experience (Fernandes, 2022). There are a whole host of technological interventions to train professionals: they have shown contradictory results, particularly in terms of impact on stigma (for a review see Rodriguez-Rivas et al., 2022 ; Tay et al., 2023). Some have actually proven counterproductive, increasing the desire of subjects for social distance from those with schizophrenia (Brown, 2020 ; Morgan et al., 2018 ; Rodriguez-Rivas et al., 2022 ; Silva et al., 2017). Rodriguez-Rivas et al. (2022) argue that these negative outcomes may be explained by the focus of the interventions on symptoms rather than the recovery process, which may increase stereotypes and prejudice. Moreover, it has been suggested that they should be used with caution and ideally in combination with educational or contact interventions (Ando et al., 2011). We aim at developing an augmented reality (AR) intervention for training mental health students. Nonetheless, there is no data on French mental health students' training needs. Our objectives were i) to explore the training needs of mental health students for an AR instrument and ii) to use this data to prototype a unique AR simulation of schizophrenia symptoms for training purposes.Methods: A mixed participatory approach (qualitative and quantitative) was used to analyze students' needs and comprised two stages.Following Traynor (2015) methodology, a focus group of N=6 psychology students was organized to identify i) the relevance of a survey on the training needs of health students and ii) create the survey content. A thematic analysis of the transcript was then carried out using QDA Miner Lite. Finally, items for a survey were generated with the focus group on the basis of the thematic analysis results. The ...