In certain traditions and cultures, it is a tradition to believe that certain animals are represents certain symbols. It may consider as a metaphor, which is often humorous, sad or cruel by nature. In this context, TRIN is conducting a survey titled ‘You and the Owls’ with collaboration of University of Lausanne to evaluate the thoughts and impression of Owl to human being.

In Bangladesh, social-cultural-financial constraints and a scarcity of mental health care practitioners has deprived families raising children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) from regular monitoring, care, and support. However, the overwhelming adoption (~80%) of mobile phones in Bangladesh in recent years has created an opportunity to improve the existing practice of care using affordable mobile applications. The design of mCARE will follow Value Sensitive Design (VSD) approach to ensure a tight integration with the local economic, social, and cultural values in Bangladesh. A positive outcome of using mCARE will promote scaling up this service to all of Bangladesh. This study will introduce a novel digital platform for behavioral research for both public and private mental health institutions in Bangladesh. Furthermore, the administrative (public-private collaboration) and technical (mCARE tools) infrastructures developed through this project can later be utilized and/or replicated for long-term monitoring of other chronic diseases including diabetes and AIDS both in Bangladesh and other LMICs around the world.

The Lock down, work from home and other unprecedent events have created multilayer and multidimensional impact on our personal, social and occupational life. The mental health condition is deteriorating, the financial crisis is mounting up and staying at home is creating potential threat for domestic violence. In Bangladesh where domestic violence is already prevalent, the lockdown period and stay at home orders can cause more opportunities and scope for perpetrators. In this study, we aimed to find out the prevalence of domestic violence during this COVID-19 period and its relation with mental health.
We conducted an online survey among the Bangladeshi population to understand the pattern of domestic violence and its relation on mental health during August to September 2020. The questionnaire was disseminated through three websites and social media. Data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (IBM SPSS 22.0). We found 36.8% respondents faced domestic violence at any time of their lives and 24.2% of the participants experienced domestic violence during this period of lockdown. More than 96% and 93% of the participants respectively considered the victims and the perpetrator need mental health care. However, only 25% of them has the idea of how and where they could avail the mental health service.
Domestic violence is one of the old hidden psychosocial and health problems and the crisis has increased during this COVID-19 crisis. The cry for mental health support is obvious and it is necessary to provide them the service to them in a convenient and cost-effective manner. Telepsychiatry can be good option for ensuring immediate mental health support.

Based on a global health perspective, this project aims to (1) analyze the status of COVID-19 pandemic surveillance and epidemiological watch measures in six low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs): Haiti, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo, Bangladesh, and Pakistan; and (2) examine risk and protective factors related to preventive attitudes among the populations of the six LMICs. Specifically, it will assess the knowledge and false beliefs related to Covid-19 in the populations, their perceptions on the readiness of health systems, the impacts of public health instructions, stigmatization, and conspiracy theories associated with COVID-19, and their impacts on preventive attitudes. It will also assess anxiety and depression associated with COVID-19, as well as the community resilience of these populations

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed multilayered and multidimensional stress and crisis in our life. The increasing digital dependency and the social media use may impact our metal health and wellbeing. Moreover, fake news are spreading on Facebook. However, there is a dearth of literature about the pattern of social media use and its relation with mental health from multinational study during the COVID-19 crisis.
This online cross-sectional study was conducted with 1005 participant from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Peru, Ukraine, and Albania between March 15, 2020 to April 25, 2020. The survey question was disseminated in different website and social media pages and respondent also shared the survey questionnaire on their social media. The inclusion criteria was adult who were using Facebook for at least 6 months.
What we found: The participants spent average 1.64 hours each day on Facebook specially for COVID-19 related content which was 42% of the total social media use per day. The anxiety and stress of the participants was related to the gender and the hours spent on Facebook for COVID-19 related contents. We conducted manual thematic analysis of the viral fake news that revealed 6 key themes: i) transmission of Covid-19, ii) Covid-19 infection and spread iii) treatment of Covid-19, iv) duration and extend of the pandemic v) Conspiracy theories and vi) Death related information
The pattern of Facebook use has multilayered and multi-dimensional effect on mental health and the impact is influenced by sociocultural context.

Smoking is a practice a substance is burned to create smoke which is breathed in to be tasted. Tobacco smoking is a practice of burning tobacco and ingesting the smoke which is produced. People who start smoking at their early stage are more expected to develop severe addiction to nicotine than those who start at late stage. Different studies show that, this group of people often would like to quit smoking but are not able to do so. Distinct mhealth approaches are found cost-effective, scalable and sustainable in cessation of smoking as well. In this study we are keen to evaluate which mhealth approach is more effective in cessation of smoking among University students.

Lack of mental health service has been documented as a major contributor to the global health burden and like many other developing countries, most of the rural people in Bangladesh are out of the radar of mental health care. However, Bangladesh has a strong network of 15000 community health clinics with more than 185,000 community health workers. These primary health care providers and clinics can play a vital role in effective minimization of mental health treatment gap in the rural communities of Bangladesh. If we can train this large number of grass root healthcare workers along with interested local volunteers, the mental health treatment gap can be minimized. However, to train them with usual classroom setting will cost a huge amount of budget and manpower which will be difficult to implement in resource limited settings. This resource constrain can be solved by implementing internet based mental health training for the community health workers and volunteers. This study will try to find out and analyze the critical factors (eg. Acceptability, internet cost and availability of high-speed internet) which may impact the implementation of online training for mental health of the health volunteers and community health workers in Bangladesh. The research question is “What are the critical barriers of implementing online training program for community mental health volunteers in Bangladesh?” A clear understanding on the barriers of online mental health training will work as a background study will help to design and develop an effective nationwide online mental health training.